Paper short abstract:

Based on 12 months of ethnographic fieldwork with undocumented West African migrants located in Delhi, this paper explores how such migrants experience and navigate the law and state apparatus in India, such that entails practices of both friction as well as collaboration with the everyday state.

Paper long abstract:

The turn of the 21st century has seen a rising trend of migration from the African continent to India. While the actual numbers of migrants remain inconspicuous, relative to the population of India, Africans constitute a hyper-visible entry on India's social landscape such that has involved fractious exchanges and racial tensions. In a context where racialized hostility and antiquated colonial- era laws intersect to mediate the daily lives of undocumented African migrants, what are the entanglements with the everyday state that their migrant status so necessitate?

Drawing upon 12 months of ethnographic fieldwork with migrants from West Africa as well as with Indian residents and authorities located across Delhi, in this paper I theorize the empirical optic of 'dead papers' to critically investigate the material, affective and legal afterlife of migration documents that are past their expiry date. Specifically, I explore the criminalisation of migrant illegality in India and stipulations around the 'exit visa' to argue that the ambiguity regarding return and deportation procedures for those in possession of 'dead papers' gives rise to practices marked by both friction and collaboration between migrants and various state and local actors. The contesting practices of overlooking on the one hand (by state actors) and of overseeing on the other (by migrant actors themselves) thus reflect the multilayered strategies of the everyday state as also migrants' negotiations of them that stand located and particularized within larger socio-economic and political contexts, state imperatives as well as migrants' aspirations and trajectories.