ABSTRACT
While we often describe the modern era as one marked by an unprecedented concern for identity and identification, we often lose sight of the parallel process of dis-identification whereby a body of people either finds it impossible to make any claim to identity or is expressly deprived of the identity that it claims as its own. In this chapter, I focus on a study of the Rajbanshis of North Bengal and point out how the denials and exclusions reduce them to a body that is caught in an endless process of becoming and how the Rajbanshis live their absence by exercising agency for more than a century in ways specific to their situation.
