ABSTRACT
This chapter illustrates the negotiability of state disciplinary techniques, differentiated understandings of authority and legitimacy, and the patchwork of urban governance in contemporary India. The literature on law has revealed how legal and institutional norms have significant ramifications on India's marginalised populations Bernard Cohn outlined the critical features of colonial governmentality in the formation of Indian subjectivity, maintaining that practices of codifying and representing were crucial to the colonial nation-state; the imperatives of classification and categorisation of the Indian social world so that it may be better controlled resulted in the British investigative modalities of rule. The chapter examines the realm of biopolitics and governmentality, and second, that of informal moral economies and institutional norms, weaving in historical practice, the conceptual literature, and the empirical specifics of Old Delhi. A descendent of the colonial reliance in India on informal authorities such as the dada or pradhan, this figure is the main reason why the state cannot actualise its abstract goals.
