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Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Phalgun is standard Sanskritized Hindi; Phagun is the local Bhojpuri spelling.

2. Richard Saumerez Smith, Rule by Records: Land Registration and Village Custom in Early British Panjab (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1996); and Matthew S. Hull, Government of Paper: The Materiality of Bureaucracy in Urban Pakistan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012).

3. Veena Das, ‘The Signature of the State: The Paradox of Illegibility’, in Veena Das and Deborah Poole (eds), Anthropology in the Margins of the State (Santa Fe, NM: SAR Press, 2004), pp. 165–90; and Akhil Gupta, Red Tape: Bureaucracy, Structural Violence, and Poverty in India (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012).

4. Partha Chatterjee, The Politics of the Governed: Reflections on Popular Politics in Most of the World (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004).

5. Sanjay Srivastava, ‘Duplicity, Intimacy, Community: An Ethnography of ID Cards, Permits and Other Fake Documents in Delhi’, in Thesis Eleven, Vol. 113, no. 1 (2012), pp. 78–93.

6. Veena Das and Michael Walton, ‘Political Leadership and the Urban Poor’, in Current Anthropology, Vol. 56, no. S11 (Oct. 2015), pp. S44–S54.