Abstract
Farhana Ibrahim. 2021. From Family to Police Force: Security and Belonging on a South Asian Border. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. xv + 188 pp. Notes, references, index. $ 130 (hardback–– ISBN: 9781501759536)
In this engaging and important work, Farhana Ibrahim argues that policing is not limited to the workings of institutional forms of power and state functionaries, but is diffused through networks of sociality. This book presents policing as an embodied, social practice, and centres the family and kinship as sites of policing and moral regulation. Through in-depth ethnography, carried out between 2002 and 2017, it takes on the complex task of unravelling the relationships and investments people develop towards upholding social and moral orders in a fraught landscape of control and belonging—the borderland separating Sindh and Kutch.
In Part 1, ‘Landscapes of Policing’, Ibrahim introduces us to how policing as a practice exceeds the state and its actors. Chapter 1 begins at the border village of Dhordo, host to a national conference on policing in 2015. Even as the Indian state performs, debates and reorganises policing and nationalism at and through the border, everyday practices of policing in the borderland emerge as a ‘collaborative enterprise’, between a range of state officials and non-state actors (p. 40). Here, ‘totalising’ visions of the sovereign power of the state are set aside, in favour of exploring how the state polices through arrangements and collaborations, drawing on what Ibrahim calls forms of ‘adjacent’ sovereignty (p. 61). We are introduced to the charismatic and influential Gulbeg and his family, who seek to reorient the state’s security concerns and the needs of the maldharis (animal herders) and their animals to mutual benefit. Rather than reading them simply as ‘informers’, Ibrahim shows how interlocutors such as Gulbeg channel, direct and redirect information, trust and suspicion. They also remind us that such ‘collaborations’ are not necessarily ‘collusions’ with the state’s interests, but may open space for alternate moral orders. In chapter 2, Ibrahim explores the intersection of gendered labour, policing and military masculinities. Narrating the work of viranganas—Patidar women who rebuilt a bombed runway during the 1971 War—this chapter discusses how the shared experience of wartime labour created ‘civil-military’ intimacies between these women and the armed forces, set against the heightened military presence in the borderland (p. 69). These women object to characterisations of them as ‘militant’ mothers and of their labour as inherently feminine. Instead, they critique the machinations of politicians, whose performative memorialisation of their work obscures their labouring bodies, and the emotional courage and ‘military ethic’ they forged by working alongside military men (p. 82).
The second part of the book, ‘Policing and the Family’, moves further away from policing as a state institution, to ‘propose an anthropology of policing that is also fundamentally an anthropology of kinship’ (p. 11). Chapters 3, 4 and 5 engage with two distinct demographic groups or figures migrating to this borderland: the Bangalan or ‘Bengali wife’ and Hindu men who migrated to India from TharParkar, Sindh in 1971. In chapter 3, Ibrahim resists asking whether her interlocutors are ‘actually’ Hindu, Muslim, West Bengali, Bangladeshi, Indian or Pakistani, using instead the local category of Bangalan. This anthropological refusal to trace origins becomes an avenue for exploring the myriad forms of dissimulation, moral anxiety and desire that such categories index and an acknowledgement of how the ethnographic endeavour can risk replicating state practices of surveillance and exposure of ‘illegal migrants’. Even as the media and police seek to ‘expose’ such ‘illegal’ migrants, the Muslim families that these ‘Bengali’ women marry into view them as desirably endowed with forms of cultural capital and Islamic civility. Chapter 4 engages more closely with the traffic in information and suspicion around such marriages. Ibrahim explores why the ‘Bengali’ wife is desired as a ‘good wife’, the ‘knowledge trails’ and forms of lateral surveillance (p. 124) that are threaded between kin and cousins and the perceived threat to familial order posed by close-kin marriage. These chapters thus present a unique perspective on marriage migration (see Chiu and Yeoh 2021; Palriwala and Uberoi 2008) by reading the forms of policing undertaken within Muslim families alongside state discourses around illegal migration. In chapter 5, Hindu Sodha men from TharParkar claimed belonging in Kutch through discourses of valour, honour and Rajput caste pride. However, they negotiated kinship and marriage across the border through maternal kin networks, leaving behind their homes and patrilines. Although these men ‘check the boxes’ of who the Indian state recognises as citizens (non-Muslim migrants, as evidenced by the more recent context of the 2019 Citizenship Amendment Act) and succeeded in converting their ‘illegal’ migrations into legal citizenship, their narratives highlight how this may not neatly translate into social capital. Marked as desh drohi (traitors) for being ‘from Pakistan’ by the familial networks they marry into, they lament getting ‘citizenship and nothing else’ (p. 140). Read together, these accounts demonstrate some of the incongruities of social and political belonging in this borderland.
One of this book’s strengths is how it moves across the relationships and practices of a range of social actors, from the police, politicians, state functionaries and local power brokers to communities, neighbours and kin. This expansive approach to policing in a borderland also directs the reader’s attention to the entanglements of technologies of policing and ethnographic practice. Threaded through the text are reflections on how the anthropologist and her work are entangled in webs of suspicion through the ‘family-NGO-state-anthropologist network’ (p. 95) and the transparencies and dissimulations such a network demands. Ibrahim also demonstrates that even as the state constructs the Muslim as the ‘expendable Homo sacer of India’s democracy’ (p. 51), varied forms of sociality, life and policing practised by borderland residents belie a natural cohesion between those gathered within this category, and instead present Muslims as agents and subjects of policing.
Scholarship on sovereignty, state and policing has queried the exceptionality of police authority, resisted the naturalising of moral and social order as flowing from the state and explored the intersections of the law and the family (Bonilla 2017; Das and Poole 2004; Jauregui 2016; Kaviraj 2005). Ibrahim’s work effectively intervenes in this wider discourse by bringing together practices of ‘kin-making and border-making’ (p. 6), state surveillance and the policing practices of those constructed as its subjects to connect the domains of family and state. It will serve as a valuable resource not only for scholars of borderlands and policing but equally for students of migration, kinship and anthropologies of the state in South Asia and beyond.