Abstract
Scholarship from South Asia has often highlighted how subaltern peoples partake in social movements as figures of resistance but rarely analyse their techniques of working the law in their favour to negotiate citizenship with the state. Such modes of articulating claims through affective gestures and vernacular legalese foster plural meanings to otherwise rigid legal categories and dogmatic bureaucratic interpretation. This paper draws upon socio-historical and ethnographic accounts of Van Gujjars to highlight how these pastoralists utilise myriad forms of paper proofs and documentary evidence to engage in claim making across the forests of Uttarakhand. Through an articulation of everyday tactics with documents, engendering new paperwork, and recording environmental and spatial subjectivities, the Van Gujjars trouble commonplace assumptions of state-society relations and subaltern modes of articulation. These writing practices, we argue, represent a facet of mimetic sovereignty that allow Van Gujjars to navigate paradigms of state recognition in claiming indigeneity and reconstitute state making within forests.
Custom Citation
Mohammad Meer Hamja and Pranav Menon, 'Cultivating Legalism from Paper Proofs: Analysing Everyday Forms of Claim Making by Van Gujjar Pastoralists in Uttarakhand' (2024) 20(1) Socio-Legal Review 105.
Digital Object Identifier (DOI)
https://doi.org/10.55496/GJTM1616
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