A Government of India publication, the Gazette of India, is the legal medium through which official documents ‘come into force’. Published 'by Authority’, Extraordinary Notices in the Gazette enact Executive Orders and Acts of Parliament, announcing them as ‘hereby coming into force’. The Extraordinary Notice is a media object with creative force, mediating performative authority through simultaneity of speech and action. Read as an illocutionary speech act (Austin 1962, Searle 1968) and performative utterance (Yurchak 2006), the Notice is at once both a statement and an action.
The Notice's ornate, colonial form is visually striking. In scroll-like fashion, an Extraordinary Notice has a standardized official header that spans the upper third of an A4-sized page. The bold-faced, calligraphic font in the document header evokes the mythic, disciplinary authority of the state (Gitelman 2014). The four-headed Lion of Sarnath, the National Emblem of India, towers over the header, captioned with the text 'Satyameva Jayate’ (Truth Alone Triumphs). The header states that these notices are published by 'PRADHIKAR', and in the English text that follows, in all caps: 'AUTHORITY'. The Indian state is both author, and AUTHORITY.
How is this authority understood and experienced among the people whose lives these official documents purport to effect, especially in cases of incomplete illocutionary uptake? Pakistani Hindu refugee-migrants in India frequently share images on social media of Gazetted Extraordinary Notices related to their legal status and recognition. In September 2015, refugee-migrants widely shared an image of a Ministry of Home Affairs' Executive Order, and, in December 2019, an image of the Government of India’s (GOI) controversial, Hindu nationalist Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA), two Extraordinary Notices that naturalize India as a home for Hindus from Pakistan. Pakistani Hindu refugee-migrants are not typically literate in the two languages of the Gazette of India: Hindi and English, but the symbolic domination of Gazetted Notices is such that these documents nevertheless enjoy wide circulation on social media, as images with explanatory captions.
In particular, in the 2015 Extraordinary Notice, the Government of India (GOI), ‘hereby' exempted 'persons belonging to minority communities in Bangladesh and Pakistan, namely, Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, Jains, Parsis and Christians who were compelled to seek shelter in India due to religious persecution or fear of religious persecution and entered into India’ from the regulations of the Passport Act, 1920 and Foreigners Act, 1946 which require foreigners to have valid visa and passport documents to stay in India [emphasis added]. 'Hereby' equates the issuing of the Extraordinary Notice ('the utterance’) with the enactment of any new rules, in this case, the consolidation of 'a certain class of foreigners’ with special exemptions. The Notice goes on to state: 'They [the rules] shall come into force on the date of their publication in the Official Gazette.' [emphasis added].
The GOI’s Press Information Bureau subsequently issued a press release announcing the Sept 2015 Notice and major news outlets ran stories for example, that Pakistani Hindus could now stay in India, free from a fear of deportation. But the GOI often does not implement the new realities it pronounces in Extraordinary Notices. My long-term ethnographic fieldwork with Pakistani Hindu refugee-migrants in Rajasthan reveals the deferred sociolegal belonging and recognition that this population continues to experience with the rise of Hindu majoritarianism in their ostensible ‘natural home and refuge’, India. As I will discuss in the conference presentation, in the face of experiencing deferred recognition and social benefits promised to them by the GOI, Pakistani-Hindu refugee migrants endeavored to imbue Notices with authority through tactics such as printing out digital images and delivering hard copies to Indian immigration authorities. My analysis of how these Notices circulate in practice reveals the ways aspirational citizen-subjects negotiate political promise and bureaucratic technologies of recognition in the face of irregular state authority. In focusing on the semiotics and uptake of Extraordinary Notices, I argue for an anthropological approach that centers questions of circulation in the analysis of the force of this given media object, and ultimately its production of state authority.
Natasha Raheja is a Postdoctoral Associate of Anthropology. She engages ethnography and documentary film to explore questions of migration, citizenship, and mediation along the India-Pakistan border.