It demands a kind of compliance to a taxonomised structure. For us to follow a set of instructions to turn in the correct documents, forms, proofs and annexures. For our claims, then, to be turned into fungible files that are organized around acronyms, codes, and numbers; that move through offices, departments, wings, divisions, and blocks. Bureaucracy in its labyrinthine structure expands out endlessly; it intimidates, confounds and exhausts.Â
Our film – set in the Reception Room of Delhi Development Authority, a major government department for public housing and infrastructure in New Delhi, India – is about how people navigate bureaucracy, of how its imposed bureaucratic compliance is engaged, negotiated, subverted even. Before Delhi acquired its new sheen as a ‘global business capital,’ it was a ‘sarkari city’ — the seat of the sarkar, or government. The city was literally and metaphorically constructed out of uniformly built forms administered by the state’s planning bodies and sustained by state funding. The city has much changed since, in its present existence and future ambitions. This is mirrored in part by the structural transformations to its bureaucratic body below the skin of its urban surface; we see the underfunding, the parcelling out of public works to the private sector and, simultaneously, efforts towards digitization and ‘smartification’ of bureaucratic processes. Still, amidst the rapid urban changes, the older built structures remain, though somewhat faded and undermaintained. As can be seen too in the Delhi Development Authority; its imposing bureaucratic structure stands, even while the figure of the sarkar, with its affectations of welfare provisioning and protectionism, recedes from the public conscience.
The short film is an exploration of this bureaucracy through its arriving public. Extraordinary is the personal and immediate way in which they address the state, seeking out the ‘correct person’ to guide, assist, and do. The desire to speak to ‘someone’ – to know who is what and sat where – and to then approach this person and pursue them to do the ‘correct thing’ is a deeply political exercise. It practices a form of political citizenship that ascribes a moral authority to the state on which its citizens practice claim-making. Bureaucracies, then, become lively spaces of political performance and sociality, bound together (in varying degrees of durability) by social norms of caste, class, ethnicity, religion and gender. It is here, in the interpersonal and the particular, that the contract between the abstract entity of the state and its equally abstract citizen-subjects is enacted through a series of socially mediated pleas, petitions, favours, reciprocities and demands. Even as the collective imaginaries of the sarkar disappear behind the oversized figures of individual strong-man politicians, the sarkar and its faded promise is recalled. Sustained it is in people’s mundane interactions and imaginaries.
