Tarangini Sriraman, In Pursuit of Proof: A History of Identification Documents in India

Abstract

Against a history of ID documents that defines them only as products of the State, Tarangini Sriraman, historian and political scientist, shows how such documents are co-products of the State and its subjects, the citizens. In so doing, she distances herself from a classical and Eurocentric history of ID documents, defined as “a unique subset of bureaucratic writing,” which considers them only from the perspective either of the Enlightenment or of a history of domination (Sriraman 2018:26). O...