Doctoral Dissertation Research: Everyday Policing and its Publics in Contemporary India

In the quotidian encounter of the public with the state, the police are central figures and this public encounter with the police in turn is typically mediated through legal and bureaucratic forms of writing. This dissertation project analyzes the production and circulation of these forms of writing by the police in order to study the ways in which these documentary practices condition the relationship of the police with its public and as these forms are themselves deployed by different kinds of discursive practices. The study examines the multiple mediations through which the modern state is experienced in everyday life by studying the relationship between policing and its publics in post-independence India. A crucial attribute of policing under Indian criminal procedure law is the requirement to keep extensive documentary records of routine criminal investigations to regulate the police interaction with the public during the course of investigation as well as to allow for institutional oversight, both by their police superiors and by the trial courts. These documents are the key points of access to police practices in their everyday materiality, whether for the public or for the ethnographer. The focus of the research will be on the social life of these documents in order to examine their role in shaping everyday life. The project is an ethnographic study of police practices of documentation; and an analysis of key discursive forms in which these police documents are brought into play guided by claims of "publicity": judicial pronouncements, with their rhetorical address to "the public" in whose name crime is prosecuted and media representations of crime, with their performative summoning of an ideal public to support policing efforts. The research methodology is thus aimed at a triangulation through multi-sited ethnography.