Production of Bengali-ness: Identificatory Infrastructures and the Politics of Belongingness

National Institute of Technology Silchar (5-6 December 2025)

This workshop explores how documentary regimes—from colonial censuses to the NRC and Aadhaar—have shaped and reshaped the meaning of being Bengali across religious, linguistic, and territorial lines. Drawing on Appadurai’s (2012) claim that “communities do not exist until they are documented,” we argue that identificatory infrastructures do not merely record populations; they actively produce Bengali identity through mechanisms of inclusion, exclusion, and surveillance. Framing Partition as an ongoing process rather than a singular rupture, we examine how state-administered documents—voter IDs, refugee certificates, ration cards—serve as politically charged sites that authorize or invalidate claims to “Bengali-ness.” While prior scholarship has focused on class, aesthetics, or communal histories (Ray, 1980; Chatterji, 1995; Sengupta, 2015), this workshop foregrounds the bureaucratic apparatus that produces legal categories like “illegal immigrant” or “declared Bangladeshi” (Yesmin, 2024). The 1985 Assam Accord and its legacy in the NRC exemplify how historical cut-off dates and documentary demands have rendered many Bengali Muslims effectively stateless. Across the border, Bangladesh’s own reliance on identificatory infrastructures—e.g., Enemy Property lists, Smart IDs—has marginalized groups like Biharis and Hindus since 1971. The 2019 Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) marks a significant shift, turning Partition memory into legal exclusion by fast-tracking non-Muslim refugees while denying the same to Muslims (Punathil, 2022; Datta, 2022). These infrastructures do not merely reflect difference—they construct it, operationalizing foreignness through documentary traceability.  This workshop invites critical engagement with how identificatory infrastructures shape Bengali identity across borders, how they institutionalize exclusion, and how affected communities resist, negotiate, or subvert these documentary regimes—particularly in regions where fluid identities are forcibly fixed through state classification.