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Paper short abstract

In post-NRC Assam, grief is deeply political. Hyperdocumentation and bureaucratic scrutiny shape who can mourn and how, yet communities resist through rituals, care, and memorials, asserting dignity, belonging, and quiet defiance, revealing the entanglement of state power, death, and everyday life.

Paper long abstract

My paper examines how state power, everyday governance, and moral anxieties converge in experiences of death and grieving in contemporary India. Drawing on ongoing doctoral research on the aftermath of the Assam NRC process particularly among Muslim residents who find themselves hyperdocumented yet perpetually scrutinized—I explore how necropolitics operates not only through the threat of exclusion but also through the quieter, slower violence that shapes how communities grieve. When a life is rendered precarious or conditionally recognized by the state, death becomes an intensified site of politics: who mourns, who is allowed to mourn publicly, and whose death is rendered administratively suspicious or socially illegible?

Through ethnographic moments—funeral gatherings delayed by verification protocols, families navigating contradictory bureaucratic instructions, or disputes around identity in death certificates—I show how grief becomes an arena in which the state’s classificatory power does not end with life but extends into the rituals, memories, and social claims that follow death. Yet grief is not only regulated; it is also mobilized. My interlocutors use mourning practices to assert belonging, reaffirm inter-community solidarities, and subtly challenge the necropolitical sorting that marks them as perpetually “provable” subjects.

By foregrounding these everyday practices of care, memorialization, and quiet defiance, the paper argues that grief offers a lens to understand both the reach of necropolitics and the possibilities of resistance embedded in ordinary life. Attending to death and its aftermath thus reveals not only how power is exercised but also how communities insist on life, recognition, and dignity beyond it.