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Short abstract:

The paper reconsiders discipline, governmentality and control through postcolonial context of Pakistan. In view of the East India Company’s crime statistics and census of British India, the failures of data statistics in Pakistan challenge the Western genealogy of power, revealing a mutated amalgam.

Long abstract:

This paper considers the modalities of disciplinary societies, governmentality, and control societies—broadly outlined in the work of Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze—in their mutated postcolonial forms following refraction in their colonial encounter. Taking the case of colonial India and postcolonial Pakistan, the paper will genealogically chart the state of quantification techniques informing these modalities of power between the late-eighteenth century to the early-twenty first century. The East India Company deployed techniques of quantification to inform their administration through enumeration and categorization of crimes and offences, corresponding to disciplinary power of penalization, which came to be tabulated to expand colonial rule over native populations. During the late-nineteenth century, the British Raj deployed different numbering surveys of the Indian population in the technology known as the census, which corresponds to statistical techniques of governmentality that Foucault argues enfolded disciplinary power. Since the independence of Pakistan in 1947, the postcolonial state has repeatedly failed to adequately deploy the census as an effective technology of government. In the twenty-first century, computational technologies have brought about a new era of datafication of the population—roughly corresponding to control societies in Deleuze—in Pakistan’s National Database and Registration Authority and draconian cybercrimes laws. In terms of this genealogy, the paper will argue that the neat partitioning of these modalities of discipline, governmentality, and control do not line up in the colonial trajectory, given the failures of quantification. The postcolonial state presents a mutated amalgamation of these modalities, requiring enumerative technologies to be scrutinized in their present forms.