PART I
Chapter 1
In December 2015, the Indian Intelligence Bureau (IB) organized its annual conference on policing.1 The occasion brought together directors general (DGs) and inspectors general (IGs) of police from across the country to Dhordo, a village in the Rann of Kutch, which runs along the India-Pakistan border and is situated in the western Indian state of Gujarat. The conference was an annual gathering to review internal security and police organizational matters. Usually held in the capital New Delhi, the newly elected prime minister and leader of the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), Narendra Modi, decided to shift the conference’s location to more field-oriented sites. The first two conferences after he assumed office were thus organized in places that had a close proximity to national borders: in 2014, the northeastern city of Guwahati was chosen for “increasing the morale” of police forces serving in the politically and militarily sensitive northeast.2 The following year, it was convened in the Rann of Kutch, on India’s western border. Here, a vast tented space was erected on the salt-encrusted desert that stretches from Kutch into Sindh, called the white Rann after a successful advertising campaign emblazoned it onto the tourist map of the region. The prime minister was in attendance on all three days of the conference, a fact noted as exceptional in the extensive media coverage accorded to an event that seemed to draw more comment for its spectacular staging than its agenda. Local and national newspapers splashed images of the prime minister and home minister taking a walk in the Rann, doing yoga with conference participants, riding a camel safari, and watching the sun set over a pink-hued horizon, “adding,” as one newspaper reported, “a touch of glamour and spirituality to an otherwise straitjacketed event” (Jha 2015). These officially released images were of the same genre and quality as photos on tourism brochures for the annual festival in the Rann—the Rann Utsav (Scroll.in 2020). Against this picturesque and strategic backdrop, the prime minister emphasized the importance of “sensitive” policing, reiterating that “sensitivity has to be vital element of policing. Police forces should establish strong links with local community and connect with people [sic]” (Jha 2015).
On the ground, preparations for this star-studded event had begun well in advance in a village just off the conference venue, some of whose residents already felt a deeply emotional connection with the prime minister. A month before the conference, Miyan Husain’s home in the village of Dhordo was abuzz with activity; he was the chief liaison with the local administration and was overseeing a number of the preparations. Juggling two mobile phones as he fielded a stream of calls, he looked piercingly at me as he entered the room I was sharing with his sister Phupli and their niece Sofiya. We had been catching up on local news since my last visit. Looking at me intently as he tried to place me, he murmured, “I don’t forget people” (main logon ko nahin bhoolta) but asked to be excused for his memory lapse this time due to his state of preoccupation. “You have a big event coming up,” I said. “A very big [bahut bada] program,” he concurred. Four hundred tents had to be erected to accommodate the “VIP visitors,” and coordination was required with the IB to put in place an impregnable air-to-ground security blanket. Local dancers had to be vetted and trained to put up a cultural show for the prime minister. Above all, he was “one of them”—a fellow Gujarati, one-time chief minister of the state, and, as Miyan Husain and his family saw it, someone with whom they not only had a “direct line” of communication but also a deeply personal connection. Modi came to visit them in 2001, and since then, according to Husain, he has been more than responsive to every overture made by them.3 In fact, the “development” of the Rann as a tourist destination is attributed by him to Modi’s receptiveness to their ideas. “He went out of his way to put this little remote village squarely on India’s map,” even holding a special session of the state’s legislative assembly there to highlight the symbolic importance of the site to the state, and now, by making it a venue for the annual police conference, he was cementing its place in the annals of the nation-state. Sofiya had said to me earlier, hamare gaon ki dua se woh Dilli pahuche (the collective blessings from our village sent him to Delhi [i.e., enabled his victory as prime minister]).4 Miyan Husain’s family in particular saw themselves as interpellated within the state’s performance of sovereign power on this borderland. For a family of Muslim pastoralists on India’s border with Pakistan, one might argue that they were always-already enmeshed within the discursive and military production of security by India in its borderlands. With every passing decade from the initial period of decolonization, India’s citizenship and security regime has defined itself more and more clearly against the figure of the Muslim.
The Muslim is thus central to the Indian imagination of national security and citizenship even if only as the negative “other” that has to be purged in order to produce the “authentic” (by definition Hindu) citizen.5 Although this has been true of successive elected governments, this research was conducted during a decade and a half that witnessed the singular and hegemonic ascent of the Hindu nationalist BJP to power in Gujarat (where the BJP has governed continuously since 2002) and subsequently at the center (2014 onward). The general elections of 2014 marked the nationalization of what came to be known as the Gujarat model authored by the then–chief minister and subsequently prime minister Narendra Modi. Although the “Gujarat model” was used by the BJP to advertise its so-called model of economic development in Gujarat, critics have used it to address the spread throughout India of a model of governance that has reduced minorities to second-class citizens, grounded in extrajudicial killings and the systematic disbanding of democratic institutions such as the legislature, courts, and media, leading to a concentration of power in the executive to levels unprecedented outside of the Emergency during 1975 (Newsclick 2019). The new prime minister also had a controversial track record as the chief minister of Gujarat, a state that had witnessed large-scale state-abetted violence against Muslims in 2002 and is regarded as the laboratory of Hindu nationalist politics (Spodek 2010). For borderland Muslims, alienation from and attachment to the state are both legitimately felt affective modes of relating by its citizens that do not preclude each other.6 I read this not as a paradox or as a situational response but as part of an overall affective mode of relating with the state as an equal rather than as a subject of patronage alone. Subjection, desire, and surrender are all modes of engagement that states and citizens invoke with each other (Ali 2019). Although I often discussed the relationship of Muslims to the BJP in Gujarat during the 2000s, I never elicited a direct condemnation of the state from Miyan Husain. All he said was “politics to kuchh aur cheez hai” (politics is something else altogether). There is perhaps a recognition here that to be political entails potential contradictions in the determination of the social.
Miyan Husain was anxious that all preparations for the conference remained on track. Despite the burden of this significant responsibility, he seemed unfazed. “VIP” guests were no strangers to this village, and Miyan Husain’s family was well equipped to handle them. Ever since my acquaintance with his sister Phupli and niece Sofiya from the early 2000s, I had become used to hearing of Dhordo referred to as “India’s last village,” their geostrategic location woven into the tourist-friendly narrative they produced for visiting guests. The Rann is a saline desert that does not support agricultural production. Habitation is sparse; village settlements consist of agnatically related Muslim pastoral communities living on a currently precarious grassland ecosystem known as Banni. Animal breeding and milk production is still the mainstay of Banni’s maldharis (animal herders), all of whom are Muslim. The predominantly Muslim demographic profile of this border region has ensured that Banni remained highly visible within policy discussions on how best to police the border; significantly, one of the questions that occupied early postcolonial border management debates was how to generate “trust” within predominantly Muslim border residents in the aftermath of India’s partition: these regions were now bordering Pakistan, an ostensible homeland for the Muslims of undivided India. Dhordo is the last of these pastoral settlements in Banni, located just before the international border. Like the rest of Banni, home to once-renowned pastures, Dhordo was also famous for its ghee (clarified butter), hand churned from thick milk collected from the distinctive horned buffaloes bred by the maldharis in Banni and across the border in Sindh. The opening up of the Rann as a tourist destination through the annual festival of the Rann organized by the Gujarat state tourism department with increasing success throughout the 2000s brought cinema stars, industrialists, and hordes of tourists primarily from other parts of Gujarat who are keen to participate in a kitschy mix of desert safari and border tourism (Nair 2016). Dhordo’s location on the “nation’s edge” is keenly reinforced by the state administration and its military-security apparatus, which uses the village as an important site for the performance of sovereignty in its borderlands, more spectacularly so in recent years.
Thus singled out for a conference organized by the IB on behalf of the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) to discuss matters pertaining to police, intelligence, and security reforms, not only was Dhordo’s strategic and symbolic importance underscored, but it was also not the first time that this border had been the site for a discussion on policing. Although the theme of the 2015 conference was how to bring the police closer to the common people, the question of policing the borderlands was a strongly debated one within the state bureaucracy in the early years following decolonization and Partition. A key strand in this debate hinged on the issue of police professionalization and the extent to which it should be distant and professional or more closely connected with the local civilian population. In the following section, I present an overview of this debate as a way to begin to set out the ways in which we tend to think about “the police” as an institution of state and then “policing” as a more general form of social control. I then shift away from the statist optic of police as an agent of violent mob control or crime fighting to thinking more broadly of policing during times of peace. This also attempts to redefine borderland policing in terms of networks of sociality across a series of sites rather than as a preconstituted institution or arm of state.
Policing the Border, 1947–1949
Subsequent to the announcement of a formal partition of British India, new contours of border management were put in place in India. These were neither uniformly nor seamlessly iterated across newly constituted borderlands. In Kutch, two distinct views on border management emerged within the state department. Although one viewed border security in terms of the local custodianship of border residents, the other favored professionalization of border control by investing in men and materials from elsewhere, thus ensuring, it was believed, their impartiality vis-à-vis the local population.
S. R. Chaudhri, IG of police (Delhi and Ajmer-Merwara), was in favor of the former view. Barely a few months after the partition was announced in 1947, he toured the state of Kutch and submitted a set of recommendations on police reorganization for the newly constituted border region. He was quite categorical, noting that there was no need for the commission of a separate border police force. In his report on the reorganization of Kutch police dated February 2, 1949, he emphasized that the Rann was a useful geographical deterrent for “any raider from Pakistan area to visit any of the villages in Kutch State near the border for purposes of loot only.” Elaborating his belief that cross-border raids in the region would only be with a criminal intent, he added, “I was also told that the people on both sides of the border are interrelated and are mostly Muslims; so there can be very little communal motive behind a raid. There have been a few incidents near the border, but they related mostly to the satisfaction of private grudges against each other by the men from the other side.… It would not, therefore, be necessary to have a special police force for the purpose of protecting the border only” (emphases added).7 Chaudhri proposed that existing police stations at border outposts were sufficient to tackle smuggling activities through known routes. In his reckoning, a community that was threaded through with ties of kinship—and by this he assumed relations of trust—at the local level would essentially police itself, protecting itself against (external) criminal threat. There would be no major cross-border incidents of the type that would threaten national security, Chaudhri reckoned. With a high degree of assumed social order and internal regulation—because all residents were mostly Muslims and interrelated due to consanguineous marriages—there was no need for external policing through the state in this view.
On the other hand, the commissioner of police in Kutch, H. R. Thakkar, had different ideas on police reorganization. Some months earlier, in a letter dated November 10, 1948, Thakkar had written to the chief commissioner, the highest administrative officer in Kutch, broaching the subject of police reorganization.8 He was shocked during his inspection of the Bhuj police headquarters and city police station. The constables were shabbily turned out, he wrote; they “hardly appeared to have any rudimentary knowledge of drill.” The social composition of the force was also a cause for concern. He observed, “A majority of the men are illiterate and Muslims,” urging a firm overhaul in standards of recruitment. “Kutch,” he added, “is more vulnerable to Pakistan activities, and therefore a strong, well-trained armed strength and intelligent L.I.B. [Local Intelligence Bureau] are fundamentally needed.”9 This letter contained a detailed proposal for the reconstitution of Kutch’s police force, touching on almost all aspects of organization—dress, recruitment, training, housing, salary, mounted constabulary, and intelligence; it made a strong argument for the institution of village police, deeply embedded in local social networks. In contrast to the visiting IG of police’s assessment, the police commissioner in Kutch was of the firm view that the border required specific attention from the security point of view. He wrote, “The Northern Boundary of Kutch faces Pakistan and intensified police patrolling is essential on this border.” Acknowledging the increased vulnerability of Kutch to what he cryptically referred to as “Pakistan activities [sic],” he felt that “a strong mounted patrol on the border line is all the more necessary for security purposes.”
These were the two views on border security and the proposed division of responsibility between civilian populations and the military-police complex in the maintenance of national security. The first point of view—held by Chaudhri—was that the absence of violence along this border in the wake of the partition—unlike in Punjab—was encouraging; cross-border kinship ties between Muslims in Kutch and Sindh would, in his view, continue to serve as a strong deterrent for violence. In other words, there was no need for an external provision of border security because it was assumed that the local community was a harmonious one owing to their being related to each other. The second view—represented by Commissioner of Police Thakkar’s insistent letters to the chief commissioner of Kutch—argued that national security was far too important to be left to local residents, all the more so if they were Muslims on the border with Pakistan, therefore with suspect national loyalties. Thakkar proposed a plan for the professionalization of the police force in Kutch, noting that at the time, such was the pitiful condition of so-called policemen that there were certain border outposts where there was practically no distinction to be made between policemen and local villagers. He underscored the fact that existing “policemen” had “no arms, no uniforms, no sanads … nothing with them to show that they are policemen.”10 They had no training and were unaware of police duties. “They are,” stated the disgruntled police commissioner, “simply local people told that they are policemen to check smuggling, etc. They draw their pay and work according to their own sweet-will [sic] with practically no supervision or check.”11 Thus, professionalization and an upgrade of police infrastructure in the borderlands was of utmost priority from the point of view of national security.
These two early views on policing the border may be taken to be the general framework within which the state understood border policing in the immediate aftermath of Partition—the role of the police force in the containment of violence, the necessity for professionalization, modernization of its materials, and its strict demarcation from the local population. Eventually, the second model, professionalization, predominated. In this ethnographic study of border policing, I focus on a key question that this debate does not address—who or what is the police? Although the state is focused on the significance of guns and uniforms and the overall context of violence (or its absence) in the constitution of effective policing, the sections that follow indicate that policing is perhaps more effectively constituted through networks of sociality that devolve on the control and flow of information during times of “peace,” not all of which are confined to the institution of the police as an arm of state alone but on social networks that circulate more ubiquitously in this borderland society. These networks of sociality undermine a strict distinction between state and society, police and policed, and (especially in this context) underscore the position of the borderland Muslim as the subject as well as agent of suspicion.
Civil-Military Interactions
As we saw in the case of Miyan Husain and his family, there are complicated ways in which the lives of border dwellers intersect with those who are officially charged with border maintenance. In other words, it is difficult to constitute the authority of the civil police or the military independently of the more locally embedded forms of sovereignty that exist adjacent rather than supra- or subordinate to them. Policing emerges as a collaborative enterprise that brings state officials—those in and out of uniform—into various kinds of mutually reinforcing relationships with those who are technically “outside” the military-police apparatus and indeed who may belong to those very categories that are regarded with a more or less permanent suspicion—as Muslims are on this border. Suspicion and surveillance are forms of practice that are just as often deployed by the state in its management of populations as they are used the other way around or laterally between groups of people. The sovereign power of the state, when it encounters its counterpart in Banni, must learn to coexist with it in some form of arrangement; its aspiration to totalizing power must be set aside.12
Miyan Husain, who was busily arranging for the police conference when I visited him in 2015, was heir to a sovereign power that did not derive from the state. Recall that his niece Sofiya indicated to me that it was the prayers (dua) of their village that cemented the political fortunes of the prime minister, as he was able to graduate from head of a provincial government to the highest elected position in the land. The implication is that the sovereign power of the state is here dependent on the prayers and goodwill of Gulbeg’s sovereignty. Gulbeg, colloquially referred to as sarhad na santri—guardian of the border—was the de facto sovereign of all of Banni’s pastoral populations, cutting across their own jati and agnatic ties.13 As a charismatic figure, his de facto “control” over Banni’s maldharis was rarely questioned in public, even if there were privately expressed reservations about his means and motivations. Gulbeg’s family has always held the sarpanch (headman) position for the group of villages that came under its jurisdiction. “We never have elections,” said one of his relatives who prefers to remain unnamed. “A meeting is held in the otlo [the public guest-receiving room] and the headman is decided. While Gulbeg was alive, he made the decisions. The year the position was reserved for a woman candidate, his daughter Phupli became sarpanch.” During the time of my field visits, the position was occupied by Miyan Husain. Gulbeg is recalled as someone who made his own rules and defied opposition from among his kinsmen and kinswomen. Whether he was their friend or enemy, Gulbeg was no doubt a force to reckon with. Betrothed in his youth to his first cousin in the village (his mother’s sister’s daughter), legend has it that he fell in love with a woman from a neighboring settlement. He “abducted” her and brought her home (uthha kar shadi kar li, literally “picked her up and married her”), a known form of marriage in earlier times. The abduction and marriage were an open declaration of hostility by Gulbeg on his neighbors whose honor and pride were deeply insulted. They lodged a “case” against Gulbeg with their learned relatives, and an Islamic scholar—a man from the same community as the warring parties but from a neutral village—came to adjudicate. The bride was shielded behind a curtain and asked her views on the matter; she relayed her consent to being Gulbeg’s wife. The “case” was resolved; the social feud continued for two generations during which no marriages were conducted between the warring villages. Eventually, even these ties were restored. However, it was not just the maldharis and their women over whom Gulbeg’s authority extended. It was suggested in Bhuj, the district headquarters, that not a single file moved in the district collector’s office without Gulbeg’s assent.14 When I visited Dhordo for the first time in 2002, Gulbeg had passed on, but he still lived on larger than life by way of the influence he clearly wielded in the corridors of power. As the one-time leader or chief (agewan) of Banni’s maldharis, he was a liaison between Banni and the state, a mantle that has passed now to his son, Miyan Husain. Middle-class residents of Bhuj called him a “smuggler” and “informer,” part of the “public secret” of law enforcement on the border that allowed state officials to patronize him, but this does not credit him as a sovereign power in his own right. As I argue here, Gulbeg’s sovereign power did not accrue from his proximity to the state; indeed, it often appeared as though the state derived legitimacy through its proximity with Gulbeg. His family recalled that he worked for the state in an honorary capacity, commanding the armed forces in the India-Pakistan war of 1971 but not taking a salary for it. Gulbeg clearly did not see himself as merged within the military-security or policing apparatus of the state, but I would suggest that he is not entirely a “semiautonomous” zone of local sovereign power that remains uncolonized by the state (Hansen and Stepputat 2005).
The figure of Gulbeg allows us to formulate what the concept of an adjacent sovereignty might look like, the terms of which may be clarified through the following examples. Gulbeg’s sovereignty is not quite the exception or margin within state law, as documented, for instance, by Deborah Poole (2004) in the figure of the Peruvian gamonal or the strongman in other parts of India (Hansen 2005). In many ways, the figure of the gamonal is evocative of Gulbeg: “A highly personalized form of local power whose authority is grounded in nearly equal measure in his control of local economic resources, political access to the state, willingness to use violence, and the symbolic capital provided by his association with such important icons of masculinity as livestock, horses, and a regional bohemian aesthetic” (Poole 2004, 43). Yet, Poole’s rendition of the gamonal is a figure who is a representative of both the state—as “magistrate, police officer, and jailer” (44)—and “extrajudicial, and even criminal power that the state purportedly seeks to displace through law, citizenship, and public administration” (43–44). The gamonal represents that form of primitive control that the state has not entirely suppressed, that lies within it. Gulbeg, on the other hand, is not a representative of the state, but he is essential to the state’s claim to sovereignty in its borderlands.
In adjacent forms of sovereignty, the state does not garner for itself a priority of form. In other words, it is not evident from Gulbeg’s example that it is the state that provides a model of practice, such as writing, that other forms of sovereign power emulate or mimic.15 Even as the state was doubtless keeping a close watch on Gulbeg, even deploying his assets—both material and symbolic—within the larger maldhari network in Banni as it sought to garner their “trust,” it was clear that he kept an eye back on the state and its allies as he meticulously documented every discussion and visit to him by tourists, police and security officers, and other officials. Records of visiting officials from the police, army, and the local administration are maintained in diaries and visitor’s books that run into volumes. They are kept locked in a steel wardrobe, the key in Miyan Husain’s safe custody. The visual archive is easier to access: photographs are carefully pasted into albums or framed and adorned on the walls of the main entrance to Dhordo, in the mehman khano (room for receiving guests). In almost all these photographs, except for the most recent additions to the collection, when Miyan Husain assumes center stage, Gulbeg is in focus. He cuts a charismatic picture: posing sometimes in the jeep he bought at a military auction and then refurbished, posing other times with a rifle, a dramatic figure in the midst of the Rann; in yet other photographs, he is flanked by one or another official from the police or army. There are photographs of visiting officials in and out of uniform dining at his home with their families and one black-and-white photograph where Gulbeg is pictured attending a meeting with state dignitaries, including the prime minister, in Bhuj in the aftermath of the 1971 war with Pakistan.
The photographs also speak eloquently of a masculine affinity between Gulbeg and his guests as they went riding into the Rann on horseback, binoculars and guns in hand, on joint hunting (shikar) excursions, the “rituals of virility” that often mark the relationship of informers with officials (Glaeser 2011, 288). Here, however, the symbolic markers of sovereign police and military power in the borderlands—weapons, uniforms, and vehicles—bleed into each other. When officials visit Gulbeg and are photographed with him, with a few exceptions, they are not wearing uniform. The forms of interaction between Gulbeg and his guests make it clear that it is Gulbeg as host who scripts the interaction. The guests, regardless of their rank or status in the military-bureaucratic apparatus, for the greater part leave their uniforms and insignias of status behind, dining with their families, ostensibly as mere guests, in civil clothing. In the wide expanse of this desert, it is Gulbeg who is king. He knows every nook and cranny of the lay of the land, where camels can safely cross the border avoiding the sticky wetland sections of the Rann (daldal). This knowledge is honed through generations of living a pastoral life and updated through his frequent sojourns across Banni. His jeep—having once been a military jeep—is also indistinguishable in these parts from stately signs of authority, even though he has personalized it to suit his own needs. The members of the military-bureaucratic elite come from New Delhi and belong to different parts of the country; they must familiarize themselves with this terrain in order to effectively police it.
Gulbeg dined his visitors sumptuously at his home. The written entries in a series of visitor’s books unanimously bear testimony to Gulbeg’s hospitality, what those who remember him today refer to as an unstinting and generous mehman nawazi (hospitality). In these books, which contain valuable insights into the sociology, ecology, and politics of Banni during Gulbeg’s lifetime, visiting experts in the fields of wildlife, fodder development, animal husbandry, dairy development, and tourism all commented on his finely honed knowledge of the area and also his hospitality. Gulbeg’s generosity was received warmly by guests, who were nevertheless reminded of the strategic importance of his location. In 1975, a flight lieutenant of the Indian Air Force stationed at Bhuj visited Dhordo and wrote of his visit: “It’s better to stay with people of [sic] such a large heart. They would come forward to help at any time and no matter what difficult situation they are in.”16
It is in this spirit that Gulbeg was visited so continuously by a stream of guests. Although his charisma was doubtless part of the connections he made seemingly so effortlessly with a succession of officers posted to the region, they were aware of what Gulbeg had to offer the military-security complex of the state in return. Indeed, it was Gulbeg who oriented each successive set of officers to the local issues and suggestions for how to develop the area in a way that would be of mutual benefit to both the maldharis—in terms of the ecological governance of Banni and its human and animal population—and the state’s security concerns. In this respect, he inverted the role of the “expert,” imparting his own expertise to the technocrats of the state, who needed Gulbeg’s guidance to navigate the terrain. A regular stream of dairy development officers visited from other parts of India and came away impressed by Gulbeg’s knowledge about bovine breeds and the finer aspects of milk production. Dairy development was seen not only as a form of revenue generation but also as a form of surveillance and to cultivate loyal border subjects, integrated into the mainstream of the national economy.
Securitization, Surveillance, and Development
Documents in the state’s archives indicate a growing mistrust of Muslims in India from the 1950s and discuss the imperatives of earning their “trust,” a corollary of securing their loyalty.17 In more contemporary times, the development of tourism is an important component of the Border Area Development Program (BADP) in Kutch, just as the development of industries in the Rann is also a part of the overall project of surveillance through development.18 Notwithstanding the fact that work and labor were seen as central to controlling and pacifying the border, from the perspective of Dhordo’s residents, all the development projects in the Rann—tourism and industry—are rescripted as miracles and prophecies set in motion through Gulbeg’s charisma and foresight rather than an imposition from the state administration. Bromine mining in the Rann is a source of income for many in Dhordo as they are employed as managers in the single factory complex a stone’s throw from the village.
The industrial plant is almost at the border and painted with military camouflage colors. Although technical staff come from outside, local people (mainly from Dhordo, a source of some resentment in other villages) are employed in small managerial capacities and as contract labor. Setting up the plant involved collaborating with the central government and the army, which controls this section of the Rann. The manager stressed that employment of locals has paid dividends, as earlier “there was a lot of cross-border activity which has gone down.” Similarly, women’s work of embroidering textiles at home was pitched by nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) as an important service to the nation. “We work in so many villages, most of them border ones,” asserted a senior manager of a large organization that has been working with women in Dhordo for decades. He continued, “We need this, otherwise Kutch will become another Kashmir,” a reference to Islamic militancy and the movement for Kashmiri independence.
In Dhordo, on the other hand, the rationale for the industry is reconfigured around the person of Gulbeg. His son Miyan Husain recounts the story: “As far back as 1979, my father said to the sarkar [government], ‘Next year, you won’t find us in Dhordo anymore.’ He was right; the saltwater [kharo pani] from the Rann was steadily encroaching onto the village settlement. That’s when he persuaded the sarkar to build a bund and to test the water. They found it was full of mineral deposits. This was how the idea came about to manufacture bromine in the Rann; it was basically my father’s idea.” Similarly, the idea of promoting the Rann with cultural festivals and tourism is attributed by his descendants to Gulbeg himself. On February 29, 1992, an entry in Gulbeg’s visitor’s book notes that a delegation of thirty-one members of the Gandhidham Chamber of Commerce and Industry visited Dhordo as part of an itinerary to the neighboring locations of Khawda and Karo Dungar (the famous “black hill” of Kutch) on the occasion of the “First Rann Festival of Kutch” and commended the work of the state and central governments’ “step to bring Kutch on the map of tourism for the foreigners and local inhabitants of India who has [sic] a poor opinion about Kutch.”19 Miyan Husain talks of how, in a bid to continue his father’s legacy in Banni, he has succeeded in getting the state to provide a national highway, a secondary school, electricity connections, an ATM, and even a helicopter joyride for the children of his village—all through constant negotiation with the state. Although these bring “development” to the village, they are couched in the language of mutual benefit for both sides. “Baccha rota nahin to ma doodh bhi nahin deti” (even a mother does not give a child milk unless he cries for it) is Miyan Husain’s pithy justification for his constant demands on the state. In this case, the state is only too eager to provide because it enables them to share in the sovereign power of Gulbeg and his family.
Yet these additions to everyday life—the gift of “development”—on a border village are not applauded by everyone. What happens to the seat of sovereign power in Banni, Gulbeg’s home, when it is overexposed to public gaze? Phupli’s (Gulbeg’s daughter) open distaste for the constant stream of visitors who flock to Dhordo as a result of the new tourist promotion brochures comes up often in her conversations. Not only was Gulbeg’s control unchallenged, but there were also the “God-given” (Allah-diney) bounties of the land. “Banni was like a mother’s womb [ma ka pet]; our children could roam free in the Rann; that’s how secure it was. Now we have to be careful of whom we let into our houses; it’s not the same at all,” she emphasizes. Phupli was groomed by Gulbeg to receive the unending stream of “VIP guests,” making sure everyone was comfortable when guests came and stayed the night, which was usual in the days when it took the better part of a day to drive from Bhuj to Dhordo. She made lasting friendships with many of the women and became for some “the face of Kutch” (Shah 2013, 14). Phupli gives us a sense today of how to manage the degree to which one may wish to make oneself transparent to a world that is pressing in more and more forcefully, allowing a careful calibration of the relationship between the physical margin (emphasized when Dhordo is referred to as the “nation’s last village”) and its centrality to Banni’s sovereignty. She clarifies that because of her father, they were always networked into circuits of sociality with the policing function of the state. Yet, surveillance was at least a two-way affair, if not more dispersed as I have suggested, with Gulbeg’s keeping an eye on the administration as sustained as the other way around. In present times, the neoliberal state has packaged every available piece of land into a tourist extravaganza. Border tourism is a useful way to generate revenue as well as to keep an eye on sensitive subjects. However, Phupli is not so happy with the addition of new forms of surveillance and the feeling that she is now expected to be transparent as fish in a bowl (being in a zoo is how she put it).
“So much has changed and nothing has changed,” she sighed on a hot summer morning, lowering herself onto a bright patchwork quilt on the floor on which I was sitting with a cup of steaming tea. “Wait, I will send for another cup for you; this tea is so hot you will scald your mouth,” she announced. In seconds, one of the young women huddled in the kitchen is summoned with a clean white cup, daintily patterned with pink roses sitting on a matching saucer. I am directed to pour half of the piping hot brew from the full cup into it. Phupli is well respected as an elder aunt and grandmother; she enjoys the status her fame and renown has brought her, and today she can exercise some degree of control over the younger women of her extended family.20 She was also Gulbeg’s favorite child, always with him when he received his “VIP guests,” and this allowed her to cultivate her own status and following. She is still striking looking with a tall strapping physique. “I am strong,” she told me one time with a twinkle in her eyes. “I gave birth to twelve children of whom nine lived. Nowadays, girls are like waifs [doobli-patli]; they don’t eat, and they are unable to bear the loads we did in our day.” Nonetheless, she has taken many young girls from other villages in Banni under her wing, training them in the technique of bharat (embroidery) that once earned her so many accolades. Now she has retired, her own term for this new phase of her professional life when she sits back and watches the winds of change wash up at her village. Phupli learned how to interact with visitors at her father’s knee; there is a practiced ease to the manner in which she plays hostess. However, she has been quick to remind me that she has no interest in meeting the random assortment of people who land up at their doorstep nowadays. On another occasion when she and I sat together in the calm hum of the mid-morning, everybody busy at work, she expressed sudden anger with the constant attention they received. “Aakho Hindustan tooti pyo ai” (the entire country has burst in upon us), she exclaimed dramatically throwing up her hands, her black head covering sliding to the floor, eyes flashing in indignation. “The rann utsav has brought all sorts of people; some are good and some are bad. I only come out to meet old acquaintances of my father’s and other old-timers. I am not interested in displaying myself like an animal in a zoo [chidiyaghar]!”
The day we discussed change, turning back to my cup of tea she had remarked, “Look” (dekho), gesturing to the now-empty cups of tea next to me; I had admired the delicate design on the cup. “People are often surprised to see Chinese [foreign] things here; I say, what’s new? We have always had foreign goods in our village. It was because of my father and the links he had with the outside. There was constant coming-and-going—aana-jaana.” Returning to her opening comment, she reiterated, “Yes, things have changed, too. Earlier, we did not always have two meals a day; if there was rotla [bread] in the morning, then perhaps there was none in the evening. If there was plenty for the night, then there may not have been a meal for the next morning. Now we have plenty to eat, and that is no small thing. But there are other things to be wary of as well … too many people, too much unrestricted coming and going. Not like when Baba [Father] was alive.…” she trails off, emphasizing not for the first time the one quality of Gulbeg that is most often recalled today—“control.” The presence of “Chinese” or foreign goods from a time before roads, satellite television, and mobile phones becomes, for Phupli, a measure of modernity and connection with the “outside” even as visitors who have traveled on a long and arduous journey to this seemingly forgotten border outpost are “surprised” to see things that, to them, are evocative of the more cosmopolitan spaces they have come from.21
As reiterated by Phupli, control is also about retaining some element of agency in how to engage with others, determining constantly who is to be let in and when, rather than the present time when hordes of tourists threaten to challenge her carefully maintained sense of home and the world, inside and outside, testing her family’s hospitality to the extreme. Control allows for a strategic management between watching and being watched. Although Gulbeg observed the observers, crafting his own narrative, the sudden explosion of tourism, its democratization, as it were, for the new hordes, not the carefully handpicked elite of the officer cadre or foreign visitors interested in learning about textiles, but the vast masses from across the country, fills Phupli with distaste. She does not want to be rendered transparent (like animals in a zoo); thus, she returns to the idea of control, which allows her to maintain these boundaries between the work of observing and being observed. Gulbeg’s famed hospitality incorporates a relationship between hosts and guests that is a complex mix of pragmatism and virtue; as Magnus Marsden (2012) reminds us, hospitality may be tinged with ambiguity, even hostility.
On his part, Gulbeg maintained meticulous records of official visits to him that were nevertheless often made in a playful, “personal” vein—including wives and children, out of uniform, even to go on hunting or shooting trips. His visitor’s book recorded everyone, regardless of what brought them to his home. Miyan Husain was persuaded to share some of his father’s papers with me, although I have no doubt that I have only scratched the surface of this fascinating archive constituted by books, photographs, and stacks of paperwork: letters, visitor’s books and personal diaries, together providing an invaluable record of Banni and its maldharis, as well as a very material archive that has kept an assiduous, even intimate, track of the state and its functionaries, ironically by a largely nonliterate population. Although it is clear that Gulbeg was a valuable resource to the administration, whether we call him an informer, or a coproducer of borderland security (as is implied in his appellation sarhad na santri), Gulbeg kept an eye on the administration, too. His personal diary records sundry details of his day-to-day life in an amateur Gujarati script: of marriages attended, cricket scores, lyrics of Hindi film songs, and routine household expenditure on staples such as wheat, rice, and sugar. It also records a trip made by bus into Bhuj where he met with the district collector. This entry, made on April 27, 1963, mentions his traveling by bus to Bhuj to see the collector and records his dinner with the police commissioner in the official state guesthouse, an honor usually reserved for official guests. The following day at 9:00 a.m., Gulbeg had an appointment with the collector. These notations indicate that Gulbeg was received as an equal, on par with the most senior government functionary. This is what suggests that the nature of his sovereign power was adjacent to, rather than nested or graded within, state sovereignty.
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 wide expanses of the Rann of Kutch, accompanied by senior police and army officers, could be read as a way in which to anchor the local deployment of state power in his person: the person who was also—as a Muslim man on the border—the recipient of the state’s surveillance. On the other hand, I contend that the relationship is a more complicated one where the direction of control and suspicion are not always easy to detect. Surveillance and information flows are not a one-way deployment from the state or the military alone but are managed and negotiated across the so-called civil-military terrain whose contours are therefore only murkily distinguishable (Lutz 2001). The relationship between Gulbeg and his officer acquaintances may have more than a passing shade of similarity with the relationship we, as anthropologists, cultivate with our research subjects. The latter have at their disposal information that is valuable for the anthropologist, just as Gulbeg no doubt had for his contacts in the police and security infrastructure of the state; the question is, how is this information trafficked and negotiated by them to yield social capital vis-à-vis each other but also relative to other networks of sociality? It is not enough to read the figure of Gulbeg as an informant to the state; the category of informer maintains intact a network of patronage that infuses the state with a primary form of power that it bestows on those it needs to cultivate for its own purposes. Instead, what if Gulbeg has the space to decide how to use his sovereign power, where he is located in a field of information management and surveillance that also allows him to leverage his own family’s status relative not only to the state but also vis-à-vis other Muslims in Banni? This also allows one to decenter the trope of patronage in the way in which state-society relations are frequently understood in South Asia.22
Policing, Subjectivity, and Intimacy
Although police deployment and militarization are often justified by states as means of securing their own sovereign power and for the production and maintenance of security, they are often central to the way in which order-disorder and security-insecurity are experienced as forms of everyday life by those in the vicinity of policing. Police and military presence may be experienced as reassuring, as is the case with the retired Hindu schoolteacher we will meet in chapter 2, who reposed faith in the sound of daily military air drills, but it may also compound a sense of insecurity and suspicion among peers, especially in the context of a borderland society already saturated with the deployment of various kinds of intelligence agents, producing what Nosheen Ali (2019) has described in the context of northern Pakistan as “suspicious subjects.” She underscores that suspicion is not an innate pathology of people but a direct consequence of their subject formation within the context of militarization. Suspicion, she argues, is “integral to the emotional structure of state power” (Ali 2019, 9). The question here is, does this kind of subject formation enable intimacy within subjects so designated, or is it in the very nature of suspicion that it is inimical to intimacy for it precludes trust? Those who are subjected to policing do not necessarily create community just because they are policed by the same agents. In a nutshell, my argument is this: we know that Muslims occupy a particular place in India’s citizenship and security regime. The existence of Muslim-majority Pakistan, carved out of British India on the eve of Independence, ostensibly as a homeland for India’s Muslims (nevertheless one that many of India’s Muslims chose not to relocate to) is the stick that Indian Muslims (and other dissenters) are beaten with every time their “patriotism” is found lacking. If, following Giorgio Agamben, Muslims are the “bare life” against which a totalizing sovereign state produces itself, we need to ask what forms of life does it facilitate among those who are thus produced? Does the fact that Muslims on the borderland are the expendable Homo sacer of India’s democracy lead to the annihilation of life, or in fact, does it actually allow for other forms of life to flourish? I suggest that even though they are read by the state as “Muslims,” therefore “bare life,” this appellation does not necessarily produce intimacy or coherence within the Muslims of this borderland. But this does not mean a denial of life either; forms of policing by the state do not lead only to collaboration or resistance to the state. How do borderland Muslims respond to surveillance by the state? Well, they engage in surveillance of their own. In fact, the Muslim citizen on the border is part of a variety of policing practices that s/he deploys vis-à-vis the state but equally vis-à-vis each other, breaking apart the coherence of the catch-all category of “Muslim.” “The Muslim” as a demographic category that is produced and disseminated by the state and its agencies in fact ceases in that moment to exist. This also allows me to reclaim for the Muslim citizen of India’s borderlands some measure of agency as s/he is part of his/her own sovereign forms of policing that take place within the family or the maslak and are not always and only directed with or against the state.
Forms of policing that are embodied in agencies of state, such as the police, army, paramilitary forces, and intelligence services, mirror forms of policing as they play out in the domain of the family and networks of kin and community. I do not speculate on which is logically prior to the latter but instead gesture to connections between the two realms to broaden the scope of what we understand policing to be—that is, to delink its associations as a form of state action alone.
Although one view in the state department—as shown through excerpts from some of the debates in the 1940s—believed that a common religious identity would be a deterrent to violent social disorder in the aftermath of Partition—assuming therefore that all Muslims would find intimacy with each other in a homogenous religiously defined identity—I found during my stay in Kutch that this was far from the case. In fact, the very identifier “Mussalman” (Muslim) was hotly debated in Banni. The Muslim male was, without a doubt, the subject of a heightened suspicion by non-Muslims and the Indian state during the entire duration of this research. This will be illustrated in subsequent chapters. This did not produce intimacy within those thus produced. Relationships between borderland Muslims were often structured by a deep suspicion, even hostility. This came through most starkly with respect to maslak (sect) affiliation. In chapter 3, Hasham introspects on what it means to be called a Muslim: “We think growing a beard makes us Mussalman,” he says, concluding that they are not really Muslims at all because they do not follow what is generally recognized as good Islamic practice “from the heart” and do not follow Koranic injunction strictly. This is a sharp contrast to the state’s view of its border populations, whose identities are read primarily—as archival documents indicate—as a homogenous category of Muslims. Whether this homogeneity was seen as a positive factor promoting social order (Chaudhri writing, “people on both sides of the border are interrelated and are mostly Muslims; so there can be very little communal motive behind a raid”) or a deterrent to national security (Thakkar’s concern that “a majority of the men are illiterate and Muslims”), it did not account for the multiple ways in which these border populations negotiated their identities vis-à-vis each other, notwithstanding their being lumped together as one category by the state, development agencies, or even the anthropologist.
In the early 2000s, when I had first begun my fieldwork in Kutch, Muslims in Gujarat were scarred and disillusioned with the state. The pogrom against Muslims had taken place in February and March 2002, and the aftermaths were felt over the course of the decade and beyond. In 2002–2003, many Muslims—particularly in the cities of central and southern Gujarat and its commercial and cultural hubs such as Ahmedabad and Vadodara—still lived in refugee camps. Hundreds had been burned or hacked to death, women raped and maimed (Ghassem-Fachandi 2012). Although Kutch had not witnessed this kind of violence firsthand, people were keenly attuned to the events farther east. Muslim men in the border villages that formed my fieldsite, who were my earliest informants (I was able to access women only much later), often spoke to me of the “war” (jung) against Muslims that they felt was unleashed by the state. Some of them admitted that they could be candid with me because I was “one of them.” This assumed proximity—of religious affiliation, even though I was vastly separated from them in terms of class—which was something that enabled me to be “trustworthy” even though they knew very little about me when I first entered their lives. I remained keenly aware of this dynamic. It was not uncommon for me to be “warned” about the ways in which the state and its intelligence networks operated. An older Muslim man, for instance, said to me on my very first meeting with him as a PhD researcher when I told him my name, “So you are a Muslim. Then I will be direct with you [ek cheez bolta hoon, apke mooh par]. Often when we sit and talk among ourselves, these things come up for discussion and I will share them with you. When you go to border villages, there will be an IB [Intelligence Bureau] man following you just as there is with us. You will do a study on the Jatts [a Muslim group in Kutch], and they will do a study on you,” he warned me. Yet, this acknowledged targeting by the state did not produce a shared sense of community among them in any de facto way, and this is important for it allows us to acknowledge that the tracks along which trust and suspicion flow are not always predetermined.
Although I was taken into confidence by most Muslims I met—even if only for the sake of appearance—who nevertheless paid scant attention to the details of my biography or practice of religion, I found that there was much discord and suspicion among Muslims in Kutch. Much of this had to do with maslak or sect affiliation between those who adhered to the (in this context) reformist Ahl-e-Hadis and the more traditional Ahl-e-Sunnat wal Jama’at. I have discussed this in detail in earlier writing (Ibrahim 2009; also see Simpson 2008). Nizam was the one person I got to know in the field who made no secret of his suspicion vis-à-vis me. Our encounters always left me slightly uneasy, often trapped, and with the distinct impression that he was testing me with trick questions, trying to trip me up in one or another way. I always got the feeling that I did not quite pass his tests. I first met him during the summer of 2001, on a brief preliminary visit to the field. He was the maulana (religious teacher) at the madrassa in the village of Sonapar, which became a key research site for me the following year. I remembered him as a shy young man, sharply turned out in a crisp white kurta pajama, a stark contrast to the squalid surroundings. My fieldnotes for the day recorded this meeting along with the observation that the NGO group that had accompanied me on this visit had spoken highly of his efforts to educate the children of the area. A year later, I was back to begin my dissertation fieldwork in the village and asked after him. There was what I felt was a somewhat long pause after which I was told that he had been dismissed from his job and was probably back in his home village in Banni. Surprised, I pressed for more information on why he had been dismissed but was only told that he had not been found to be “suitable” (barabar nahin laga). “Did you have some work with him?” I was asked. Intuitively, sensing an undercurrent, I found myself responding vaguely: “Well, no, not really. Now that he’s left, perhaps I will not need to look him up after all.”
My second meeting with Nizam was many months after this. I had set out with Mohamed Hosain to look him up in the village that we had been told he was from. He was now teaching at the madrassa there and he lived next to it, a few kilometers away from the main village settlement. I could not recognize him as the man I had met a couple of years ago. At first, he said we had not met before, but on some prompting, he said he remembered our meeting. I tell him I am interested in the state of education, or the lack of it, in Sonapar, and as a former maulana, what did he think? I say by way of an icebreaker that I had discussed this with others of the community in Bhuj, and he gave me a couple of anecdotes that described the state of affairs as he saw them in Sonapar. Much of their illiteracy, he felt, was a result of their “un-Islamic” ways. As a follower of the Ahl-e-Hadis maslak, he had tried to stop them from visiting the tombs of saints. I thought this was likely a cause of friction that led to his eventual dismissal. Before leaving, I asked if I could photograph him. He did not respond to say either yes or no. When I took out my camera, he declined politely: “Perhaps some other time.” On the way back to Bhuj, I mentioned to Mohamed Hosain, my research assistant, that Nizam had struck me as far shiftier than when I had first met him in Sonapar. I thought part of this was his discomfort at being tracked down—as he was seeing us off, he had asked me, “What exactly did you say to people in Bhuj?” I assured him that I had not said anything about him, just a general conversation about the state of education among Muslims. I could not shake off the slightly suspicious vibe that I felt from him, but I did not want to be overly paranoid about this. When I asked him why he left Sonapar given that he was clearly doing good work there, he said he wanted to return home after the earthquake. Mohamed Hosain did not share my discomfort with the interaction; his explanation for Nizam’s altered demeanor was far more prosaic. “In Sonapar, he lived with people all around him. Look at the loneliness here in Banni: the harsh terrain, only animals around you. How do people pass their time here? One would lose one’s mind,” he added, shaking his head.
Even though we had exchanged phone numbers, I was surprised to receive a call from Nizam some weeks after this meeting. He happened to be in Bhuj, he said, and wanted to meet me. Mohamed Hosain was not free, so I invited Nizam over to my apartment for tea. I made us a cup of tea each, and we settled down on a cotton rug on the floor, facing each other. His first question to me, without preamble was, “Which maslak do you belong to?” As I tried to dodge the question as best I could, he proceeded to make a number of insider jokes about maslak practices that I did not catch. As I became increasingly uncomfortable, wishing Mohamed Hosain had been around to help steer the conversation, I tried to indicate that we were on the same side as far as maslaks were concerned. Whether or not he believed me, after this I found Nizam more forthcoming. He talked about his childhood and upbringing. Spontaneously, he brought up a number of topics that I had wondered about but had not been sure how to broach. He told me that he was invited to teach at the madrassa in Sonapar. He had not wanted to at first, but then he agreed to go. “Everyone there used to go to dargahs, they used to all indulge in shirk [non-Muslim ways—that is, they were not Ahl-e-Hadis].” He said it was his hard work for the two and a half years that he taught at the madrassa that “converted” them to “the right path” (sahi rasta) and they became Ahl-e-Hadis. In his telling, elderly women looked around them surreptitiously to see if he was in sight and try to sneak off to the dargah, such was the fear he inspired. Soon, all of these jahil (un-Islamic) activities stopped. He ensured that the mosque was completely filled up.23 Then he went on, and I was surprised to hear him say, “I felt really bad the other day when you came to visit me that I was not more forthcoming. After you left, I realized what an important thing you had said, that along with religious education, people also need secular education in order to progress. I feel grateful for you to have come and made me see this fact. I am a teacher and I ought to take more responsibility to this effect.”
I was quite taken aback by Nizam’s volte-face, as it were. From this point onward, he became very interested in my research, calling me regularly for updates, wanting to drop by my apartment if he happened to be in Bhuj. He arranged for me to meet his father who was a poet and was interested in the history of his people. Despite Nizam’s keen interest and cooperative attitude, I could never quite shake off either my early suspicions or my guilt at having earned his trust by letting him believe I was a believer in a particular maslak when it was a nonissue for me. I was never quite certain that I knew why he was being as helpful as he was. He always seemed to know whom I had gone to meet and of events where I had been spotted by (he claimed) someone he knew. On one occasion, an older woman in Sonapar told me that he had indicated that I might approach her (“You know the young man [chokro] who used to be the maulana at our village? He had come to the house and told us that you would be coming round”), even though he had said to me that after his dismissal, he never set foot in Sonapar. On another occasion, Nizam was concerned that because he had not heard from me in a while, I might have been “brainwashed” by others and therefore no longer interested in his father’s version of their history. He was at pains to stress that others would mislead me and that he and his father should be my sole informants. But if I was conscious of being potentially manipulated by Nizam for his own purposes, it is no less true that I also policed our interactions to conform to a certain public persona that I had crafted for myself as an anthropologist in a polarized society.
Although I was usually accepted as one of them by Muslims in Kutch, my class position and the fact that I was clearly a woman from an urban metropolis allowed me a certain facility with members of all religions and castes. I had a number of Hindu acquaintances and informants, some of whom became friends during the course of my research. My class position allowed me the ability to rent an apartment as a single woman in a middle-class Hindu housing society in a neighborhood that had only one Muslim family in residence (they were in fact the ones who found me the apartment I rented). Mohamed Hosain and his family had never set foot in this neighborhood until they came to visit me, even though they had lived in Bhuj their entire lives. I was keenly aware of my class status and other privileges that allowed me to make choices that were not available to others—women or Muslims. This privilege was certainly key to my access to Muslims as well as (to some extent) Hindus during the course of this research and allowed me to transcend to a certain extent the ghettoization that Muslims tend to face in Gujarat. The first time Nizam brought his father to see me brought home to me the precarity of my position and of what I had to do in order to maintain the public persona of “neutrality” that I had assumed. In my fieldnotes, I had written: “The doorbell rang; I opened the door and beheld Nizam’s father for the very first time. I saw them today, standing outside my apartment, as the other Hindu middle-class residents of [the neighborhood] would see them: a young Muslim maulana in a white kurta pajama [loose trousers with a long shirt] with an older man; the latter is wearing the traditional lungi [lower-body wrap] typical of Banni, a bright ajrakh [hand–block print technique typical of Banni and Sindh] turban on his head. He had a henna-dyed beard and kohl-rimmed eyes. He carried a long pole on his shoulder, at the end of which was slung a cloth bundle. Textbook representations of the Muslim: one a scholar, the other a maldhari [pastoralist]. And I knew that I could not continue with them visiting my home, would perhaps have to arrange another venue” (emphasis added).
As they left that day, I saw Sonal—a Hindu friend who will make an appearance in chapters 3 and 4—walking toward my apartment with her mother. Sonal worked with the NGO through whom I first met Nizam in the summer of 2001. I introduced them and asked whether she recognized Nizam from a few years ago, but she did not. Quite inexplicably—for there could be a number of reasons why Sonal and Nizam may not have interacted with each other—I became uncomfortable, with thoughts racing through my head: Is Nizam really the person he says he is? I could not recognize him when I saw him either, but then, I had first seen him two and a half years ago; is that why? He seems a little unsure around me. Why does he keep calling me? What is his stake in my research?
On subsequent occasions, I always tried to manage my interactions with Nizam so that we could meet at Mohamed Hosain’s home. Although Nizam resisted at first, he eventually complied, and over the years, his father became a frequent visitor to Mohamed Hosain’s home when he transited through Bhuj on his errands even when I was not in town. Mohamed Hosain’s young grandchildren always delighted in his stately presence and came to call him chhay vara kaka (the buttermilk-drinking uncle) as he steadfastly refused to drink tea, asking for the traditional maldhari staple buttermilk instead.
Policing as Sociality
There are thus various sites and forms of surveillance in the field; it often appears that everybody is keeping an eye on every other. Who is keeping watch? And who is at the receiving end of surveillance? It is clear that the state is no longer the only purveyor of a coherent form of surveillance but is one site of information production and management. Contrary to what we might expect from a Muslim man living on a politically sensitive borderland in a state that barely disguises its Islamophobia, Nizam seemed concerned not by forms of policing and surveillance that emanated from the state but by how other Muslims—those of rival maslaks—viewed him and what forms of interaction I forged with them. He was deeply concerned about how he appeared to me. In other words, he wished to remain in control of the narrative as it was being related to the anthropologist, much of which was related to the forms of management of maslak affiliation—how the Muslims of Banni presented themselves to me. Who qualified to be identified as a Muslim and who did not, from Nizam’s perspective, was a far more finely nuanced discussion based on their maslak affiliation. The state, on the other hand, had a far starker assertion of “Muslims” as a hold-all category, something that he did not want the researcher to adopt uncritically.
Yet, in an overall environment of uncertainty and fluidity, of borderland connections and passages, where nothing is always quite what it seems, it is not entirely clear who is keeping track of whom. Interpersonal relationships between friends, neighbors—and certainly the anthropologist—were structured by secrecy. Information was as often given as it was withheld. A new phone or electronic diary that its owner refused to share with others, even a length of cloth or obviously foreign-looking piece of crockery, when its owner refused to divulge where s/he got it from, became cause for the circulation of rumor and suspicion: “Did it come illegally across the border?” Is the new “shy” bride in so-and-so’s house who refuses to speak actually a Bengali speaker, smuggled from across the eastern border with Bangladesh? These questions are just as easily asked by the police on their regular morning and evening patrols in border villages as by friends, relatives, and neighbors. Since most of Banni’s residents are Muslims, in the 2000s and beyond, there is a new language of global terror to express distrust and fear of the Muslim male that structures the state’s policing. This is, in turn, contrasted with the ideal transparency that good citizens must have to the state. In present times, this is expressed in the move to make mandatory the biometric identity card for all citizens, in contravention of its initial stance on its voluntarism (Dreze 2017). In less technologically savvy times, it was alleged that the IB “knew everybody by name in Banni” and managed to keep track of all their activities. “The police roam about here every evening,” whispered one of my informants, circling her finger all around indicating the expanse of Banni. “Be careful of who you visit.” However, as I have indicated above, exposure to the state as “Muslims” did not produce intimacy or coherence within a group. There were multiple ways in which those policed—by the state—also police themselves and maintain their own sets of boundaries that are meaningful to their lives. This could be boundaries between different maslak adherents or between rural and urban Muslims. Social interactions with “others”—that is, with police intelligence and other agents of law enforcement but equally with visiting tourists and anthropologists—also become an important set of social networks and entanglements—of hosts and guests, of circuits of commodity circulation and exchange that reiterate a more textured understanding of surveillance and secrecy. How to negotiate the “public secret” or the agreement to know what not to know constitute the enactment of social relationships that are negotiated and performed among and across groups that include the police and state officials, kin groups, and the anthropologist. How transparent people want to be and to whom is actively negotiated in everyday interactions. Information was currency; as the intrepid ethnographer who was trying desperately hard to be at the top of her game, trying to be everywhere all at once, I found that on a number of occasions, people commented on my ability to compile information from a number of sources. Mehreen, whom we will meet in chapter 3, commented on one occasion to her kinswomen in my presence, “Look how smart she is; she knows things that even we don’t know about our own village!” This is once again a pertinent reminder of the ways in which the tools of anthropological research and of the state may end up willy-nilly mirroring each other and being the arbiter of information is one way of establishing one’s position. Gulbeg kept assiduous track of events and information. The police as an institution of state is not alone in the ability to collate and use information to its advantage.
Conclusion
This chapter has argued that an ethnographic study of security, surveillance, and policing should heed the various stakeholders of securitization, dislodging a state-centric view. Police and military personnel are without doubt in possession of impunity with respect to the perpetration of violence against civilians; this book does not undermine this fact. But there are many other loci of sovereign impunity as well, both in the so-called public and private domains. In this book, I seek to turn the ethnographic lens away from the spectacular moments of police violence to the production of peace. A key argument presented by this case study of borderland policing is that there is no clear-cut separation between those who are agents of law enforcement and those who are at the receiving end of policing, especially in “peacetime.” Networks of secrecy, surveillance, friendship, and trust in the above examples are produced through a series of dialogic relationships between state police, borderland residents, and other actors not conventionally taken to be a part of the security apparatus—for example, tourists, air force lieutenants, dairy development officers, and the anthropologist. When the debates on policing of the late 1940s are read together with borderland encounters in the present, they prompt us to critically interrogate our object of analysis to ask who or what is the police and where can we locate policing practices more generally? Moving beyond the police as a preconstituted subject and violence as one of the primary frameworks within which ethnographies of policing are situated, the chapter suggests that policing is perhaps more productively conceived of as a set of relationships that weave together multiple forms of the management of information. Finally, it seeks to disaggregate the manner in which to read the relationship 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, a theme that is explored in subsequent chapters. Muslims constitute disproportionate numbers of those eliminated through extrajudicial killings, “disappeared,” or detained on frequently unproven charges that are enabled through fast-track legislation justified in the name of counterterror operations (Sethi 2014). It may seem paradoxical, then, to encounter their enthusiastic support for the state—especially when it is led by a stridently Hindu nationalist party—by borderland Muslims such as Miyan Husain and his daughter Sofiya, son and granddaughter of Gulbeg. It is not just a hard-nosed pragmatism or instinct for survival that creates these relationships. I have suggested in this chapter that these relationships are forged as two sides of policing in practice, the negotiated settlement between forms of what I have referred to as adjacent sovereignty. The state and its institutions are interpellated with other institutions such as the family and the community as they deploy strategies of policing such as surveillance, suspicion, and control to negotiate and police various boundaries between the inside and the outside. State and nonstate models of policing are no longer distinct and discontinuous but operate within a more inclusive fabric of sociality. If Gulbeg and now Miyan Husain are intermediaries between the community and the state, they still do not speak on behalf of a homogenously constituted community. As Nizam’s example indicated, Muslims are just as often engaged in policing their boundaries vis-à-vis each other as they are with the state or the anthropologist. Questions of access—whether Phupli would agree to meet visitors who dropped in unannounced to her home, whether Miyan Husain would give me access to Gulbeg’s diaries and visitor’s books—were all constantly negotiated and managed across a complex field of activity that should be understood as constituting policing on this borderland.