Visualizing Citizenship in a Bureaucratic Frame

Abstract

In this article, I focus on how Pakistani Hindu migrant men in India circulate bureaucratic portraits of reportedly forcefully converted women, leveraging the evidentiary value of images within a visual idiom of liberal citizenship. The style of these portraits—rectangularly framed, front‐facing individuals—is akin to the style of passport photos. The images and their captions circulate as visual evidence to reify normative claims to Indian citizenship within a Hindu‐India imaginary. Such images generate veracity through their state‐like form, shaping how migrant men see themselves into recognition. By emphasizing how migrant men adopt a bureaucratic visual convention (the passport‐photo look) to make claims about associative fates based on a shared group status, I expand our understanding of the identity photograph. I argue that bureaucratic framing is an aesthetic register that facilitates claims to citizenship within the visual logics of state recognition.