Duplicity, Intimacy, Community: Of Identity Cards, Permits and Other Fake Documents in Delhi’

Srivastava, Sanjay

Abstract

In the annals of Indian modernity, narratives of tricksters and counterfeiters have a long, popular, and cautionary history. The topographies of deception outlined by colonial and post-colonial police reports established both its history as an aspect of modern industrial life as well as the city as the ‘scene of the crime’. This article explores the meanings that attach to certain contemporary acts of deceiving and faking, and the ways in which they are both produced by being in the city as well as producing certain kinds of relationships. The article focuses on the residents of a Delhi slum and their various acts of producing fake identity cards and a variety of other documents. It offers a discussion about simulation and dissimulation, feigning and duplicity, and passing and pretending as significant contexts for gaining security of livelihood and residence in the city as well as constituting specific senses of community. Faking and counterfeiting, the article suggests, are arenas where the state both constitutes itself and contributes to the making of imagined non-state sensibilities of community.

Citation

Srivastava, S. (2012). Duplicity, Intimacy, Community: Of Identity Cards, Permits and Other Fake Documents in Delhi’. Thesis Eleven, 113(1), 78-93. https://doi.org/10.1177/0725513612456686

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Acceptance Date: Sep 4, 2011
• Publication Date: Jan 1, 2012
• Deposit Date: Oct 11, 2022
• Publicly Available Date: Jan 2, 2112
• Journal: Thesis Eleven. Critical Theory and Historical Sociology
• Print ISSN: 0725-5136
• Electronic ISSN: 1461-7455
• Publisher: SAGE Publications
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 113
• Issue: 1
• Pages: 78-93
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1177/0725513612456686
• Publisher URL: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0725513612456686