PROFILE
Tarangini Sriraman
Email: tarangini.sriraman@apu.edu.in
Tarangini Sriraman's research over the last six years has been invested in the histories of
identification documents in the disparate colonial and postcolonial spaces of India. She has looked
at debates over the material forms, the legal and cultural aspects of identification documents at
various moments like epidemic control in late 19th century India, rationing during the Second World
War, compensation for Partition-displaced persons, the resettlement of slum residents post 1990 and
the implications of Aadhaar for urban poor subjects. OUP Delhi recently published her book titled
In Pursuit of Proof: A History of Identification Documents in India which uses eclectic ethnographic
approaches to trace genealogies of identification documents within domains of urban welfare
production in contemporary India and Delhi in particular. She is currently working on a new
research project on the gendered histories of alcohol regimes in two states of South India, Tamil
Nadu and Andhra Pradesh.
She was awarded the Cornell University South Asia Program Fellowship, Charles Wallace Research
Grant, London, a Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Centre de Science Humaines (also called the Centre for
Social Sciences and Humanities), New Delhi and a Visiting Associate Fellowship in the Centre for
the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi. She has also taught in a couple of colleges affiliated to the
University of Delhi and has wide-ranging interests in the fields of urban sociology, colonial
historiography, feminist political theory and modern Indian political thought.
Academic Qualifications
PhD, University of Delhi, Department of Political Science
Publications
- Book titled In Pursuit of Proof: A History of Identification Documents in India, Delhi: OUP, 2018
- ‘A Petition-like Application? Rhetoric and Rationing Documents in Wartime Delhi, 1941-45’
Indian Economic and Social History Review, 51 (3), 2014, pp.353-382.
- ‘Assault and Assuage: Identification Documents, Colonial Rationalities and Epidemic
Control in British India’ in Nivedita Menon, Aditya Nigam and Sanjay Palshikar (eds.),
Critical Studies in Politics: Exploring Sites, Selves, Power, Delhi: Orient Blackswan, 2013, pp. 271-
318.
- ‘Enumeration as “Pedagogic Process”: Gendered Encounters with Identity Documents in
Delhi’s Urban Poor Spaces’, South Asia Multidisciplinary Academic Journal, 8, 2013
(http://samaj.revues.org/3655).
- ‘The Fault-Lines of Informality: Documented Claims to Entitlement in Delhi’s Urban Poor
Spaces’, Rethinking the Urban – 2, Conference Proceedings Book, ISBN: 978-605-5120-24-5,
Istanbul: Dakam Publishing, 2013, pp. 210-224.
- ‘Feeling the Rules: Documentary Practices of Rationing and the ‘Signature’ of the Official’,
Contributions to Indian Sociology, 47 (35), 2013, pp. 335-361.
- Special Article, ‘Revisiting Welfare: Ration Card Narratives in India’, Economic and Political
Weekly, 46 (38), 2011, pp. 52-59.
- Centre for the Study of Developing Societies Working Paper titled ‘Pedagogies of Gendered
Citizenship: Mobilizing Identity Documents in a Slum’, December 2017.
Interviews, review of my book and popular article written in the wake of the book
Book Reviews
- Book Review, Journal of Interdisciplinary Economics, 29 (1), 82-85, Review of The Invisible Hand of
Power: An Economic Theory of Gatekeeping by Anton N.Oleinik, 2017,
https://doi.org/10.1177/0260107916674139
- Book Review, Studies in Indian Politics, inaugural issue, 1(1), 2013, pp.119-120.
Review of Red Tape: Bureaucracy, Structural Violence and Poverty in India by Akhil Gupta, New
Delhi: Orient Blackswan, 2012.
- Book Review, Surveillance and Society, 7(1), 2009, pp. 87-89. Review of Playing the Identity Card:
Surveillance, Security and Identification in Global Perspective edited by Colin J.Bennett and David
Lyon, London: Routledge, 2008.
http://www.surveillance-and-society.org/ojs/index.php/journal/article/viewFile/sriraman/sriraman
- Book Review, Refugee Watch, 32, 2008, pp. 121-124. Review of ‘Gender, Conflict and
Migration’, Vol. 3, edited by Navnita Chadha Behera, Series Editor, Meenakshi Thapan, New
Delhi, Thousand Oaks and London: Sage Publications, 2006.
http://www.mcrg.ac.in/rw%20files/RW32/8.Book_Review.pdf
