Construction of uniqueness before biometric authentication - proof, identity and citizenship

What is the story of constructing uniqueness in India prior to the arrival of biometric authentication, with all its hybrid predicates such as digital fingerprinting, iris, voice and facial recognition? Can this history be narrated merely by tracing sporadic moments spurred by new research and administrative interest in fingerprinting and anthropometry? Alongside these advances, it is critical that we also examine how ‘uniqueness’ entered the realm of documentation, leaving its prints in the sand of time. Where India lacked an elaborate centralized system of fingerprint registration along the lines of apartheid South Africa, fingerprinting made its way in an enduring sense, into the world of pensions and jail warrants. Simultaneously, it is critical to note that the birth of postcolonial modernity was tied up with the mandate to verify families at the dawn of Partition – in this sense, uniqueness was manifest in cross-indexing families and ration cards through practices such as serial numbers, counterfoils and indents. We will see how technologies did not necessarily emerge consecutively but concomitantly as witnessed in the intersecting post-Partition uses of photography and serial numbers. The talk will conclude by looking at the early trends of biometric identification in the 90s across disparate realms of food distribution, election, and immigration, with a couple of conjectures on what prompted the post-2000 turn to cloud and number-based authentication.

Bio: Tarangini Sriraman’s research over the last six years has been invested in the histories of identification documents in the disparate colonial and postcolonial spaces of India. She has looked at debates over the material forms, the legal and cultural aspects of identification documents at various moments like epidemic control in late 19th century India, rationing during the Second World War, compensation for Partition-displaced persons, the resettlement of slum residents post 1990 and the implications of Aadhaar for urban poor subjects. OUP Delhi recently published her book titled In Pursuit of Proof: A History of Identification Documents in India which uses eclectic ethnographic approaches to trace genealogies of identification documents within domains of urban welfare production in contemporary India and Delhi in particular. She is currently working on a new research project on the gendered histories of alcohol regimes in two states of South India, Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh.

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