Book contents
- Colonial Bureaucracy and Contemporary Citizenship
- Colonial Bureaucracy and Contemporary Citizenship
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- Archive Abbreviations
- Introduction: The Spectacle of Independence and the Specter of Bureaucracy
- Part I Hybrid Bureaucracy: How Race and Emergency Shaped the Organization of Colonial Rule
- Part II The Axis of Suspicion: Classifications of Identity and Mobility in Crises
- 2 Forms of Suspicion: Mobility As Threat, Census As Battleground
- 3 The Bureaucratic Toolkit of Emergency
- Part III Administrative Memory and the Legacies of Emergency
- Conclusion: The File and the Checkpoint – Colonial Bureaucracy and the Making of Contemporary Citizenship
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
2 - Forms of Suspicion: Mobility As Threat, Census As Battleground
from Part II - The Axis of Suspicion: Classifications of Identity and Mobility in Crises
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 November 2022
- Colonial Bureaucracy and Contemporary Citizenship
- Colonial Bureaucracy and Contemporary Citizenship
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- Archive Abbreviations
- Introduction: The Spectacle of Independence and the Specter of Bureaucracy
- Part I Hybrid Bureaucracy: How Race and Emergency Shaped the Organization of Colonial Rule
- Part II The Axis of Suspicion: Classifications of Identity and Mobility in Crises
- 2 Forms of Suspicion: Mobility As Threat, Census As Battleground
- 3 The Bureaucratic Toolkit of Emergency
- Part III Administrative Memory and the Legacies of Emergency
- Conclusion: The File and the Checkpoint – Colonial Bureaucracy and the Making of Contemporary Citizenship
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Beginning with the transition from Mughal and Ottoman rule, this chapter focuses on the forms and schedules of the census as a site of negotiation and as a battleground infused by the axis of suspicion between administrators and communal leaderships, comparing bureaucratic negotiations and processes of separation in each of the colonies. It compares how hybrid bureaucracy deployed the census as a toolkit of government, in which categories of religion, language, and region gradually solidified into ethnonational identities. Through attempts to standardize, homogenize, and separate, communities were constituted as essentially different to justify the selective pairing of administrative practice to population. Division into majorities and minorities turned the census forms into a site for negotiation between subjects and officials, as well as an arena for rivalry between communities. Suspicion or embrace of enumeration techniques depended on one’s proximity to the negotiation over resources, amidst fears of control.
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- Colonial Bureaucracy and Contemporary Citizenship , pp. 63 - 89Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2022