This article is an ethnographic exploration of a promiscuously present and instantly recognisable legal and cultural artefact in India, the stamp paper document under the Indian Stamp Act, 1899. The ‘stamp paper’ is a documentary form that is constantly escaping from its legal moorings in revenue and evidentiary law, and is being replicated, mimed and recommissioned, both in form and in substance, and in ways which blur the domains of the legal, the quasi-legal and the non-legal. Its bureaucratic authority is produced through protocols and rituals of writing, verification, identification, attestation and authorisation performed by paper workers such as court typists, stamp vendors, notaries and oath commissioners. Yet the stamp paper is simultaneously viewed as notoriously fraudulent and legally invalid—its use redundant and truth functionaries infamously corruptible. Focusing on the materiality of the stamp paper, as it circulates through the interstitial spaces of Patiala House Court Complex in New Delhi, this article seeks to address this curious paradox and provides an account of the social life of law through the travels of an emblematic yet dubious legal form.
This article analyzes the everyday legality of the preventive detention regime in Kashmir as a means of waging war against political dissidents. We follow the circulation of detainees and their files across multiple legal venues and regimes to show how the counterinsurgency state reinscribes spectacular and terrifying forms of violence through modalities of banal paperwork and iterative performances of the rule of law. Drawing on ethnographic and textual interpretation of legal documents, including police dossiers, detention orders, and police complaints, we argue that the permanent emergency in Kashmir operates through an everyday hyperlegality of indefinite incarceration that intermingles the systems, techniques, and jurisdictions of colonial policing, bureaucratic paperwork, and military warfare. Further, we demonstrate how this grid of indefinite detention manifests through a temporality of deferral and delay that comes to characterize everyday life for its subjects.
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