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The ‘stamp paper’ document, under the Indian Stamp Act, 1899 is a promiscuously present and iconic textual artifact that circulates through the worlds of Indian legality and bureaucracy. The stamp paper as a revenue instrument was... more
The ‘stamp paper’ document, under the Indian Stamp Act, 1899 is a promiscuously present and iconic textual artifact that circulates through the worlds of Indian legality and bureaucracy. The stamp paper as a revenue instrument was imbricated in and constituted by the historical processes that standardized the forms and modes of revenue collection and instruments of evidence, credit, and credibility through the long nineteenth century. Elaborate protocols of writing, verification, identification, attestation and authorization performed by paper workers and truth functionaries produced its authority. Yet, stamp paper from its inception was viewed as notoriously suspect, stamp duties as being persistently evaded and truth-functionaries as scandalously corruptible. This chapter details the discussions and disputes that surrounded the materiality and visuality of stamp paper through the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Through this account of the stamp paper’s material history, ...
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This article is an ethnographic exploration of a promiscuously present and instantly recognisable legal and cultural artefact in India, the stamp paper document under the Indian Stamp Act, 1899. The ‘stamp paper’ is a documentary form... more
This article is an ethnographic exploration of a promiscuously present and instantly recognisable legal and cultural artefact in India, the stamp paper document under the Indian Stamp Act, 1899. The ‘stamp paper’ is a documentary form that is constantly escaping from its legal moorings in revenue and evidentiary law, and is being replicated, mimed and recommissioned, both in form and in substance, and in ways which blur the domains of the legal, the quasi-legal and the non-legal. Its bureaucratic authority is produced through protocols and rituals of writing, verification, identification, attestation and authorisation performed by paper workers such as court typists, stamp vendors, notaries and oath commissioners. Yet the stamp paper is simultaneously viewed as notoriously fraudulent and legally invalid—its use redundant and truth functionaries infamously corruptible. Focusing on the materiality of the stamp paper, as it circulates through the interstitial spaces of Patiala House Co...
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ABSTRACT This article analyzes Indian occupation of Kashmir as a legal, social, and spatial process of asserting power through borders and jurisdictional claims, produced and reproduced through constitutional processes and legal... more
ABSTRACT This article analyzes Indian occupation of Kashmir as a legal, social, and spatial process of asserting power through borders and jurisdictional claims, produced and reproduced through constitutional processes and legal institutions that have enacted generalized notions of emergency and crisis. We argue that the distinctive socio-spatial power structures established between India and Kashmir in a provisional capacity amidst war and partition at the time of independence have been legitimized through rights regimes established through the constitutional structure and institutionalized through laws, executive orders, and the judicial system. We examine how India's legal incorporation of Kashmir was embedded in the constitutional drafting process and the extension of fundamental rights to the region through presidential orders, and how this legal incorporation became sedimented through the work of the courts across time. Building on Ranabir Samaddar's discussion of “colonial constitutionalism,” we consider “occupational constitutionalism” as a form of foreign dominance and control produced through the annexation of part of Kashmir's territory and its legal sovereignty to India in the aftermath of independence and reproduced through a series of legal mechanisms and processes across time that institute a state of emergency and permanent crisis in Kashmir.