Caste-based Lists and Fading Maps: Bureaucratic Anxiety and Shifting Landscapes in the Himalayan Uttarakhand after the 2013 Flash Floods

Abstract

In 2013, floods in the state of Uttarakhand, particularly in its Himalayan district of Rudraprayag, led to landslides, rockfall and landslips. To calculate compensation and provide restitution at the village level, the state administration had to verify land ownership. However, since the most recent revenue settlement was conducted in 1967, the administration had to rely on faded maps and guesswork, and they used caste-based procedures and lists. The process created bureaucratic anxiety, fuelled by an affective excess to the given paradigm of bureaucratic embodiment and procedure (described by Nayanika Mathur as the ‘Sarkari affect’). By bureaucratic anxiety here I am using a modified Lacanian formulation implying the absence of a knowledge of the other’s desire, in this case, the desire of the state. Post-disaster governance in Kedarnath creates the sense of an invisibility of the state order, which becomes opaque and difficult to gauge. Using graphic artefacts I show how gaps in the administrative framework created an interpretive space between state and citizen, how this space was mortified by the manner in which the compensation process was carried out and how such mortification affected the community’s potential to use bureaucratic gaps to create a network of subjectivity that is actively involved in its own world-making.