Scripts, scribes and scribbles: notes on drafting the South Asian city

Abstract

This paper explores the framework of ‘city drafting’ used in this Special Feature to highlight the inscriptive and documentary processes underpinning property making in South Asia. It considers two senses of drafting: as provisional and iterative writing process that sees texts as objects in motion, and as the technical art of drawing, notation, and inscriptional verification. It argues that the papers in this Special Feature, through their focus on city drafting, demonstrate the continuity of what Raman [2012. Document Raj: Writing and Scribes in Early Colonial South India. Chicago: University of Chicago Press] calls ‘document raj,’ or a colonial bureaucratic system that grounds the logic of property in documentary possession and that administers property through specific dispositions to writing. How property is known and hence possessed rests on a certain grammatology of the state, which can be understood through three ethnographic objects: scripts, or the historically specific orthographic and inscriptive rules for how property is written; scribes, or the bureaucrats and associated technical experts whose graphical and grammatalogical knowledges shape how property is made and unmade; and scribbles, or the notations, jottings, and markings that indexically draw land and documents into different relations. This Special Feature’s ethnographic focus on these three objects reveals the embeddedness of contemporary property and city making mechanisms in colonial documentary practices, thereby showing the epistemological limits of private property both in global metropolitan theory and as fungible economic form.

Keywords:

• bureaucracy
• property
• postcolonial city
• state theory
• urban governance

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

D. Asher Ghertner

Asher Ghertner is Assoicate Professor in the Department of Geography at Rutgers University. Email: [email protected]