Police/Worlds: Studies in Security, Crime, and Governance. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2021. xiv, 188 pp. US$29.95, paper. ISBN 9781501759543.
In the last few years, policing has emerged as an issue of widespread concern around the world, as we see movements such as Black Lives Matter in the US and Dalit and Muslim Lives Matter in India that resist police violence and call for abolitionist measures. The last few years have also witnessed increased scholarly interest on the theme as evidenced by the publication of several grounded ethnographies of policing, specifically focusing on the context of India. Farhana Ibrahim’s work is very much a contribution to this emerging inquiry into policing studies, albeit in a way that broadens the focus and definition of the term. Ibrahim begins her inquiry from an understanding of policing as a “complex web of discourses and practices” where “multiple agents” are involved, employing techniques aimed at “maintaining a contested social and moral order” (3).
Hence, for Ibrahim, policing is not something that can be located merely in the institutions of the state as sites, such as the state police, or the border security personnel or the intelligence bureau, but also within communities, neighbourhoods, and families as relational spaces. Evoking literature on policing of gender, caste, and family in South Asia, Ibrahim acknowledges that caste and other hierarchical socialities have always found a place in state policing practices, but she further extends the argument by saying that the family does not necessarily work merely as a site of intervention by or collaboration with the state. The novelty of Ibrahim’s argument rests on highlighting how familial, neighbourhood, and inter-community practices of surveillance and information management are very similar or often the same ones as the state-led practices of policing. Additionally, she argues that quite often the moral orders that these diverse policing agents—the state police, the politicians, the Muslim family, the community in which brides are brought in from other regions, or the women participating in rebuilding bombed-out airstrips—try to uphold are in opposition to each other.
The author also takes on William Garriott’s argument on the centrality of policing in contemporary governance, and argues that as a practice, policing is not limited to governance of public spaces but should also be understood as including governing—that is, keeping track of, monitoring, and upholding moral standards—in private personal familial spheres.
Ibrahim offers her arguments through an intensive ethnography. She takes her readers from public life (and relations to state agents) of village leaders, to private familial and marital relations which are often the subject of constant surveillance and information gathering from other members of the family or community, in the context of pastoral Muslim villages located at India’s western border with Pakistan in the salt desert of Kutch in Gujarat. She also extends her argument to include how the work of border policing, for instance by the border security force, is often projected through a narrative of superheroism and hyper-masculinity, in contrast to their often mundane realities, which are an extension of everyday surveillance and information gathering that is involved in routine police work. A discussion of Patidar women who participated in the rebuilding of a bombed-out runway during the 1971 Indo-Pakistan War also reveals how the women in question looked at the army through a narrative of hard labour and discipline, while also identifying their own work as “military work,” in contrast to a state political rhetoric of “brave mothers” or viranganas.
Through an extensive focus on Muslim marriage and interpersonal relations as well as the interactions of the community with state agents, with the anthropologist, with the social worker, etc., the author successfully brings to light a newer way of understanding the political social space occupied by Muslims in India. Both historical data as well as scholarly work until now focused more on Muslim victimhood within a Hindu majoritarian context. Ibrahim draws our attention to how Muslims in border areas of India become agents of policing in myriad everyday contexts, where they practice policing within their communities and also outwards. This also enables the reader to comprehend that despite the common practice of looking at Muslims as one homogenous group united by their vulnerability as a minority in India, the lived reality of Muslim populations does not give a similar picture. As we see from constant practices of surveillance and information gathering within, there is no unified category of Muslim.
Conspicuous in its absence is the lack of any substantive discussion of the violent side of policing. While there is a reference to works that engage with questions of violence and torture in the introduction, in the parts of the book where the author uses ethnographic narratives to discuss features of policing, there is a complete absence of any discussion of routine physical violence. In a larger context where actual physical violence by police is routine (as it is within familial relations), the reader is left wondering whether this could have been an angle in connecting the institutional and social forms of policing in the border regions of Kutch.
Ibrahim’s book is a very important contribution not only to the field of policing studies in India, but also in understanding the socialities of Muslim as well as middle-class and working Hindu groups in the communally divisive state of India. In reading Ibrahim’s book, students and scholars of society and politics in India can gain new perspectives on Muslim agency and the everyday temporalities and spatialities of governance in border regions.
Santana Khanikar
Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi