Paper short abstract:

This presentation explores what qualifies as evidence in socio-juridic spaces, as adivasi communities navigate claims-making processes in Telangana, India. It will illuminate the material practices through which documents are rendered “sound”, while also highlighting how they are subject to doubt

Paper long abstract:

Building on Weichselbraun’s work on bureaucratic objectivity (2020), this presentation examines what qualities and processes imbue bureaucratic documents with evidentiary qualities, and subsequently render them ‘sound’. Soundness, I argue, is produced through distinct bureaucratic writing practices that infuse these records with specific qualities: they embody a ‘presumed’ truth content, operate as proofs, and qualify as evidence. Thus, ‘sound’ records, despite errors of omission and commission, are perceived as bureaucratic documents with ‘an authoritative disinterested “truth”’ produced through ‘quantitative, routinised and technical knowledge practices’ (Weichselbraun 2020,121)

Taking land rights contestations and struggles as a point of entry, this presentation explores how adivasis or Schedule Tribe communities in Telangana, India, negotiate their claims to land within socio-juridic spaces, such as bureaucracies and courts. Focussing on select land documents— title deeds, land records and registries, maps as well as court records— I explore how competing claims to land are adjudicated. This allows me to demonstrate what makes certain documents “sound” as opposed to others, and how complex power relations of caste, class, religion and more permeate documents as well, rendering some more “valid” and “accurate” than others. Consequently, I show that while bureaucratic documents are considered important pieces of evidence, they are also malleable and susceptible to manipulation. In doing so, this presentation will elucidate how bureaucratic documents are sites of contestation; far from being neutral spaces, they partake in the production and sometimes even the undermining of ‘truth content’ in claims-making processes.