Paper short abstract:

Regimes of identification have to be seen in their concrete materiality to understand their effect on social life and contemporary capitalism. This paper probes the quotidian exclusions they produce and their effect on working class mobility, employment opportunities and resistance.

Paper long abstract:

Various types of identity cards are deployed by the state that are occasionally used to govern population movements within a country. They are part of a regime of identification and are bound up with social security systems and citizenship rights. Critiques of such regimes have largely centered on the infringement of privacy and the politics of representation that they involve. I argue that these regimes of identification have to be seen in their concrete materiality to understand their effect on social life and contemporary capitalism. Drawing on fieldwork in construction sites and factory premises in Ernakulam district and a market frequented by migrants in Perumbavoor, a small city near Kochi in Kerala, this paper probes the materiality of these cards in the sense of the quotidian exclusions they produce and their effect on working class mobility, employment opportunities and resistance. Migrant workers from north and north eastern India and unionized malayali workers in construction sites and factories in Kerala battle for and against these cards. These regimes of identification engender and occasion solidarities and divisions within the working class in the context of temporary migration for work in India. Migrant workers resist not necessarily class power that inheres in capital but in state and surveillance practices. Through this process, they participate actively in the production of capitalist landscapes in Kerala. In addition, this paper also examines the contradictions and nexuses between state and capital in regulating movements of people. Towards the end, I link the paper to recent debates on Aadhaar and "illegal immigrants".