Fuzzy borders

Abstract

In the western Indian city of Jodhpur, computer typists provide migration brokerage services to Pakistani Hindu refugee‐migrants and Indian immigration officers. Such encounters and their interpretations contrast with the Indian state's emphasis on governmental proximity and immediate state‐subject relations. Though computer typists—who I am calling brokers—are essential mediators, their acts of mediation are underrecognized. Immigration officers’ strategies of mediation, such as intermittently acknowledging typists, implicate brokerage as both part of and distinct from the everyday bureaucratic workings of the state. I argue that through their acts of mediation, brokers are essential to bureaucratic work and have come to embody the fuzziness surrounding where the state begins and ends.