Aesthetics of Authority: Smart Policing, Unruly Citizens, and the Politics of Visibility in Hyderabad, India

(Zoom) Dr Sneha Annavarapu 25 Mar 2024

Dear all,

You are cordially invited to the next session of the FASS Brown Bag Seminar Series in Semester 2 of AY23/24. Assistant Professor Sneha Annavarapu (NUS Sociology and Anthropology) will be presenting on “Aesthetics of Authority: Smart Policing, Unruly Citizens, and the Politics of Visibility in Hyderabad, India”.

Date: 25 March, 12pm – 1pm
Venue: Online via Zoom
Register: Zoom

Aesthetics of Authority: Smart Policing, Unruly Citizens, and the Politics of Visibility in Hyderabad, India

Critical to the popular representation of Indian roads as “chaotic” and disorderly, traffic indiscipline is an abiding Orientalist tragicomic stereotype and a source of culturally intimate local humor. In both official discourse and everyday traffic talk, the “typical Indian driver” that treats rules as mere suggestions figures not just as an administrative and epidemiological issue but a symptom of cultural and moral failure of a postcolonial public. State agencies and NGOs in India have long been attempting to make motorists obey traffic rules and regulations using a variety of punitive, persuasive, and infrastructural strategies. Drawing on multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork conducted over six years in the southern Indian city of Hyderabad, this paper explores the logics of state authority in attempting to elicit obedience and compliance from motorists on the road. Twisting existing research on urban policing in India, it examines how and why traffic law-enforcement in Hyderabad is undergoing an “image makeover” and why traffic police are attempting to position themselves not as agents of state violence but as smart, tech-savvy, and friendly service-providers. Instead of writing it off as marketing frivolity or as an insidious cover, this paper contextualizes and locate these moves within the historical context of postcolonial policing as well as the urban branding of Hyderabad.

Assistant Professor Sneha Annavarapu is an urban sociologist. Her wide-ranging research interests centre around governance, class relations, and gender in contemporary Indian cities. She has published articles in academic journals such as Social Problems, Social Change, Roadsides, Journal of Historical Sociology, and Journal of Consumer Culture and has also written for media outlets like Public Books and Economic and Political Weekly. Asst Prof Annavarapu is a regular host on the New Books Network podcast and co-founder of ‘Ethnographic Marginalia’. For more information, please visit https://www.snehanna.com/

Date
Monday, 25 March 2024

Time
12:00 PM - 1:00 PM (SGT)

Venue
Zoom