Image Description: M.C. Escher, Relativity, woodcut, July 1953. The image is described as such: “If you were to turn the print clockwise, a different section would appear at the top, but the internal logic would remain intact.”
Image Credits: Escher in het Paleis (Escher in the Palace)
Mallika Dharmaraj
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- “Practices of Violent Enumeration”
In her landmark book Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Black Life, scholar Simone Browne examines her “own surveillance practices in reading the archive”:
Do my reading practices act to reinscribe violence and a remaking of blackness, and black bodies, as objectified? Thus, I am mindful of Katherine McKittrick’s caution that there is a danger of reproducing ‘racial hierarchies that are anchored by our ‘watching over’ and corroborating practices of violent enumeration.’ (2015: 67)
Browne’s reflexivity is incommensurably rooted in her project of historicizing surveillance as “the fact of anti-Blackness” (10). Yet, without reductively grafting her framework across continents, I believe it is worth thinking through the nuances of her important ethical provocation in the context of STS in India, too. In this article, I examine “the surveillance problem within surveillance studies” through a lens that seeks to interrogate caste power. Reflecting on my own reproduction of these violent methodologies, this is an imperfect attempt to reckon with the vigilante gaze that we as caste/class-elite researchers may bring to even our ‘most-radical’ work when studying surveillance technologies – a gaze that is only emboldened by the brahminical pedagogies of our institutions.
Questions of reflexivity within STS have come to be popularly addressed with the one-stop solution of a positionality statement. Laundry lists of our social locations – “queer,” “trans,” “woman,” “neurodivergent,” and now in a trendy but rarer addition, “savarna” – have become a norm that many of us comfortably propagate, as I have in almost all my writings thus far (Gani & Khan 2024). While self-reflexive transparency is an essential starting point for ethical scholarship, materially, what has shifted? For the disproportionate majority of us oppressor-caste Indian researchers who inhabit radical discourses within fields like Surveillance Studies, generational caste capital, patronage, and supremacy continue to violently structure our methodologies and frameworks (Patel & Da Costa 2022; Dar 2015). I now want to hold to account our “anti-surveillance” practices within hegemonic Indian STS worlds.
Our marking, footnoting, and analyzing of certain people as ‘surveilled’ itself often constitutes an act of “‘watching over’” – part and parcel of the larger tradition of epistemological dispossession (i.e. McKittrick’s “‘violent enumeration’”) that the “brahminical-colonial” academy has always championed (Dar 2015). At a time when we ought to be thinking about our own implications within ongoing cultural, material, and intellectual genocide, the University only continues encouraging us to separate our work from the cops and the cameras that we so fervently critique. If we are to be relentless in our analysis of power, perhaps it is worth pausing this ever-churning cycle of academic production.
This reflection remains indebted to the lodestar of scholars such as Shaista Patel and Huma Dar, who have meaningfully raised the questions of caste and settler-colonial complicity for South Asian academics. In thinking through our collective ethical lapse, I conceive of this piece in a similar style to the article “Academically-Transmitted Caste Innocence” by Dia Da Costa, which reflects on personal and collective caste innocence/terror in the Western academy (2018).
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- STS in the Aftermath of Exceptional Violence
In their critique of Administration for Children’s Services (ACS) systems in the US, Khadijah Abdurahman writes that “modernity’s impulse to classify and quantify the socioeconomic and anti-Black consequences of racial capitalism, seeks to account for the suffering without a column in the ledger for tallying complicity” (2021). Building on this, in an era marked by neoliberal logics of reform, I want to suggest that our impulse to conduct STS fieldwork in India, too, often emerges from a public economy invested in reabsorbing the suture created by the exceptional event of state violence. We regularly find ourselves in a frenzy to create counter-archives of technology that “account for the suffering” – chronicling the “consequences” of facial-recognition, drones, or internet blackouts across regions. Perhaps the veneer of technology affords us an implicit assumption that our fieldwork will be more removed, objective, and secular as we seek to counter-narrate digital surveillance in progressive ways. Yet, precisely because biometrics is a site of historical control for criminalized communities, such research actually serves to broadcast that which is deeply personal, far beyond the realm of just the technological – not meant for our, or the public’s, eyes.
In July 2022, setting out to study facial-recognition technology (FRT) in India for my undergraduate dissertation, I conducted fieldwork interviews with four Muslim families who had been violently torn apart, owing to incarceration based on spotty algorithmic evidence. With CCTV footage used as proof in the court of law, these families were implicated in Delhi’s 2020 pogrom, all while the potential use of FRT provided an opaque veneer. Somewhere, I saw my work as contributing to a larger phenomenon of publicly intervening in uncritical discourses around technology, and documenting a newer AI-powered iteration of what I understood as a millennia-old brahminical surveillance culture in India.
And yet, I was able to do all this without realizing that my recording, transcribing, and anonymizing of these interviews themselves was an expression of that same surveillance culture taught, inherited, and living within me. While all ethnographic methods are arguably extractive, it remains all too easy for those of us conducting STS fieldwork to gather ‘data’ – without realizing that these are not merely functionalist stories of technological injustice. Despite my best efforts to probe FRT’s role in a 21st-century India, these were not interviews where technology was the focal point at all. The role of CCTV cameras was hardly a side addition. Instead, as a brahmin-savarna outsider, I was prying on incredibly personal, emotional, intimate, and painful reckonings with unthinkable violence – a rancid tale of police corruption, caste Hindu supremacy, and the violent reality of being Muslim in India every day. What I justified to myself as ‘studying surveillance technologies’ was in fact synonymous with intruding on complex practices of resistance and negotiations with intergenerational histories of discipline and dispossession. It took families questioning the point in rehashing this pain for me to recognize my entitlement in showing up to document deeply personal testimonies of already hyper-surveilled people on my smartphone.
To be clear, across movements, counter-archiving in South Asian publics has been deployed as an emancipatory method against state amnesia. For Indian Muslim women experiencing online misogyny, it has been a practice that “seeks to challenge the very authority of state-sanctioned narratives of the past” – in a word, “memory work” (Gerold & Udupa 2023). Meanwhile, Kashmiri scholars have noted the Foucauldian drive to produce ‘counter-memory’ against the Indian settler-colonial project: “not just an intellectual or archival effort, but an urgent witness and weapon that reclaims people’s historical resistance” (Zia 2025). What I am concerned by, however, is our first impulse as caste/class-privileged STS researchers to appropriate this practice into our work. When we immediately begin documenting incidents of exceptional technologically-facilitated violence, perhaps we skip over fact-finding and (counter-?) archiving themselves as expressions of power – what Achille Mbembe calls “an act of dispossession,” wherein “the historian establishes his/her authority, and a society establishes…the domain of things which, because shared, belong exclusively to no one” (2002). What is the difference between building counter-memory and reproducing datafication?
In making public the intimate details of atrocity, we dispossess communities of their “autonomous words into a prop in which [we] can lean to speak and write beyond an original text.” Our urge to capture memories/counter-memories of technology is precisely what deprives them of their privacy — paradoxically re-subjecting them to the ever-hungry machinery of public surveillance and, in turn, bolstering our own caste capital and scholarly reputation (refashioning ourselves as Gopal Guru’s “theoretical brahmins”). In Mbembe’s words, this is precisely “why the historian and the archivist have long been so useful to the state.” Intentions notwithstanding, our hyper-documentation of technology’s role in criminalized communities may actually reinforce the statist investment in hyper-surveilling them, creating a visual grammar of violence for public consumption.
In their incisive study of digital platform apps in India, researchers Palashi Vaghela and Yatharth presciently remind us that “book-keeping and record-keeping have traditionally been Brahmanical professions dominated by upper castes who keep track of the larger population and subjects of the state” (2025). Are we not only continuing this ancestral tradition when we rush to create counter-archives of technology that ultimately collude with the state’s attempt to oversee intimate community memory – “freezing [people affected by violence] in an eternal snapshot as a data point”? (Abdurahman 2021)
Indeed, surveillance is a learned first reflex for many of us. I write as a trans woman who grew up in Silicon Valley, with family wealth extracted from fascist tech/venture-capital industries. In brahmin households, there are reflexes we subconsciously learn to build even before speaking: these include observing, monitoring, and surveilling on the axes of clothing, appearance, accent, colour, diet, language, and surname. This holds even more true as many of our “childhood homes” and “family properties” become increasingly tech-savvy, as mine has in the last decade – now an ‘ancestral’ smart-home fully-fledged with Ring cameras, Nextdoor chatter, MyGate scanners, and CCTV lenses. It is no surprise, then, that our purportedly ‘progressive’ public counter-archives of technology often become reiterations of our communities’ historically extractive modes of knowledge production, which have always violently surveilled other people to create knowledge for the state. This is Derrida’s “archive fever” – our frenzied nostalgia to document the past in pursuit of a certain futurity – in action: surveillance as method, to counter surveillance as control (1995). In creating these unsolicited archives in the Cloud, in our papers, and in our journals, are we not paradoxically feeding the state’s datafication project and rendering criminalized communities even more vulnerable to violence? Our ethnographic interrogations themselves often replicate the algorithmic logic of the CCTV.
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- A Body Made into Data
Owing to Browne’s ethic, I have also begun to notice the ways in which my practice of “reading the archive” has quietly reinscribed the same visual violence (2015). Like many other STS researchers, my work has relied heavily on the famous story of Rajyadhar Konai, the first person to have been fingerprinted in the history of modern India. In 1858, Konai was working as a Bengali contractor when he was requested by British administrator Sir William Herschel to use his palm impression to notarize a governmental contract. A reproduced picture of Konai’s historic palm-print has thus often featured as the first slide in my conference presentations and the first figure in my papers. And yet, in so doing, I have failed to ask how I, too, have been participating in the casteist, colonial reduction of Konai to a legible-to-white/legible-to-savarna biometric print. In critiquing his violation, I made no space for the possibility of his refusal (Tuck 2009), and fixed his lifeworld within the surveillance order of the archive – where I stood as the watcher, a full, breathing, living human, and he then watched, ink cast on a page to be dissected, surveilled, and copied.
Whether celebratory or critical, I now wonder how many of us who critique surveillance in India from our Ivory Towers remain oblivious, or nonchalant, to the fact that perhaps there is no ethical way to continue indulging in the dissemination of a body made into data, at all. I wonder about how easily contemporary scholarship continues to circulate the 19th-century images of Hijra-trans women that were used to destroy and resettle our communities, or the portraits of oppressed-caste individuals that substantiated the infamous anthropometric volumes The People of India – both coercively taken in the name of biometrics. It is “everyday caste terror” when we critique with polish, implicate with poise, and profess with innocence, all while maintaining the very structures of control that allowed us to hold the pen – or in this case, the camera – to begin with (Da Costa 2018). In his incisive poem “I am not your data,” Adivasi sociologist and writer Abhay Xaxa brilliantly captured this dynamic:
Your words, maps, figures, indicators,
they all create illusions and put you on a pedestal,
from where you look down upon me (2011).
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- Towards Sousveillance as Method
So, what, then, does it mean to “kill the cop in your head” in Surveillance Studies? What might be alternative modes of engagement beyond citing or critiquing existing archives of violence, where the lives of marginalized people have been compressed into analogue data for consumption? Where might we locate Abdurahman’s “ledger for tallying complicity” instead? (2021) How might an anti-surveillance practice begin at home, locating the metaphorical lens in our own families, networks, publications, and selves?
To create counter-archives of Kashmiri memory, Ather Zia writes: methodologically, “the tools are closer to the essence of samizdat [self-publications in Russian, which originated in the Soviet Union, referring to the discreet production and circulation of state-banned work] in creating a chain of preservation and circulation than shouting to huge audiences from glossy LitFest platforms. You have to return to both analog and digital roots” (2025). We would do well to learn from these principles: discreetness; an investment in the analog; localized chains of production rather than public bylines; and centering “community-led memory practices” and “people’s collectives,” rather than the narratives of the state, or those of us who end up being its academic collaborators (Singh 2024).
Indeed, surveillance is fundamentally an exercise of power, hinged not just on the production of data, but data subjectivities. By contrast, initially inspired by Steve Mann’s 2003 wearable computing hacks, “sous-veillance” (i.e. “watching from below”) demands us to tangibly reverse hierarchies of knowledge production – even, and especially, when studying surveillance itself. Building upon Mann’s scholarship, Browne’s more specific formulation of “dark sousveillance” suggests an otherwise praxis that “speaks to black epistemologies of contending with antiblack surveillance” – an “imaginative place from which to mobilize a critique of racializing surveillance…that takes form in anti-surveillance, countersurveillance, and other freedom practices” (21).
What, then, does an epistemological commitment to sousveillance look like in India? Perhaps our own reflexive practices (including writing articles like this very one) cannot be merely tweaked to be made more ‘ethical,’ without materially ceding resources towards inverting the very power relation of researcher/subject. We have infinite to learn from anti-caste scholars who “study up,” turning the carceral culture of our savarna academic-elite society into a site of data collection. How arrogant we must be to position ourselves as experts on counter-surveillance, when Hijra trans-women have staunchly gatekept a secret language for centuries beneath our eyes, creating whisper networks of community knowledge to evade cisgender violence and police surveillance!
We might do well to sit longer in the “space of inescapability” of my/our complicity (Singh 2024). I cannot claim to provide easy answers to queries that should destabilise the very premise of more of my and our scholarship, but I hope that raising these questions might allow us to move towards a more reflexive practice in STS.
Acknowledgements: This article is a product of immense community labor, reflection, and input – and in particular, the indelible structural edits and conceptual direction offered throughout by my friend and mentor Astha Bamba. Because bylines continue to privilege my individual authorship over collective modes of knowledge production, I want to, at least here, make clear how thoroughly indebted this thinking is to something larger than myself – the critical discourses of anti-caste and transfeminist organizing spaces; the ongoing academic-political guidance of esteemed mentors; and the editing of dearest friends and comrades Astha Bamba, manmit singh, and Altaire Rolph.
References
Abdurahman, Khadijah J. “Calculating the Souls of Black Folk: Predictive Analytics in the New York City Administration for Children’s Services.” Columbia Journal of Race and Law, vol. 11, no. 4, pp.75–110, July 2021.
Browne, Simone. Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness. Duke UP, 2015.
Da Costa, Dia. “Academically-Transmitted Caste Innocence.” RAIOT, 24 Aug. 2018, raiot.in/academically-transmitted-caste-innocence/.
Dar, Huma. “Dear Prof. Chatterjee, When Will You Engage with the ‘Discomfort’ of Indian Occupied Kashmir?” PULSE, 10 Sept. 2015, pulsemedia.org/2015/09/10/dear-prof-chatterjee-when-will-you-engage-with-the-discomfort-of-indian-occupied-kashmir/.
Derrida, Jacques and Eric Prenowitz. “Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression.” Diacritics, vol. 25, no. 4, Summer 19915, pp. 9-63.
Gerold, Oeendrila L., and Sahana Udupa. “Becoming Archived: Feminist Resistance to Online Misogyny in India.” Social Text Online, 25 Apr. 2023, https://socialtextjournal.org/becoming-archived-feminist-resistance-to-online-misogyny-in-india/.
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Patel, Shaista, and Dia Da Costa. “‘We Cannot Write About Complicity Together’: Limits of Cross-Caste Collaborations in Western Academy.” Engaged Scholar Journal: Community-Engaged Research, Teaching, and Learning, vol. 8, no. 2, 2022, pp. 1-27.
singh, sahiba. “The ally must die: Theorizing a politics of death and unbodiment.” Sikh Formations: Religion, Culture, Theory, vol. 19, no. 4, January 2024.
Tuck, Eve. “Suspending Damage: A Letter to Communities.” Harvard Educational Review, vol. 79, no. 3, Fall 2009, pp. 409-27.
Vaghela, Palashi & Yatharth. “Casteist by Design: How Discrimination Configures India’s Platform Economy.” Logic(s) Magazine, no. 23, 30 Oct. 2025, https://logicmag.io/land/casteist-by-design-how-discrimination-configures-indias-platform-economy/.
Xaxa, Abhay. “I Am Not Your Data.” The Shared Mirror, Round Table India, 19 Sept. 2011, roundtableindia.co.in/lit-blogs/?p=1943.
Zia, Ather. “Kashmircore: India’s Tool to Erase Kashmiri Counter-Memory.” The Polis Project, 14 Oct. 2025, https://thepolisproject.com/read/india-erasure-kashmir-counter- memory-history/.
Mallika Dharmaraj (she/her) is the Growth & Development Lead at Logic(s) Magazine, whose research focuses on situating contemporary technologies within historical structures of power, violence, and complicity.
