Pedagogies of Gendered Citizenship: Mobilizing Identity Documents in a Slum

Abstract

On one of my meanderingly purposeful field trips in Govindpuri located in South Delhi, I ran into Shweta, who rents a house in a slum cluster where the word ‘rent’ is administratively and legally suspect owing to the ‘squatter’ status of residents. She was wiry and she kept her body ramrod straight while she replied heatedly to my tentative questions on the identity cards she possessed, or in this case, those that she did not. While claiming to possess no identity documents at all, she threw the words najayaz (illegitimate), lawaris (destitute), pardesi (stranger) at me to contrast her situation with that of the garib nagarik (poor citizens) who, according to her, may be poor but were nevertheless citizens by dint of the documents they possessed. Her multiple efforts in the last few years to get identity cards came up against an implacable wall where every official, broker and political patron asked for ‘proof’.