SLR Reading Circle | Law and the Paper Archive 

The Socio-Legal Review (SLR) is delighted to announce the Reading Circle series for this trimester, conceptualised around the theme ‘Law and the Paper Archive’. The texts that will be read draw from across disciplines and themes—including history, legal and political anthropology, and citizenship and statelessness studies.

The SLR Reading Circle is imagined as a space that explores the law as a lived, contested, and evolving entity—one that is shaped by and shapes a range of social, cultural, political, and economic forces. Rather than taking the law’s dominant assumptions for granted, we invite participants to think with other disciplines, perspectives, and experiences, and to remain open to the many meanings and possibilities the law might hold. As we read across disciplines, we foreground questions of methods and sources.

Concept Note: Law and the Paper Archive

Robert Cover writes that ‘jurisgenesis’, or the creation of legal meaning, takes place through cultural modes of being, which are socially and historically produced. Legal meaning thus creates ‘nomos’, or a normative universe of law, which is ‘not merely a system of rules to be observed, but a world in which we live’. The law and the paper archive examines the creation of such a world by evoking the imagery of case files, petitions, applications, documents and record rooms—which may be thought of as placeholders for desire, expressions of hurt and harm, acknowledgments of collective solidarity, and notes towards alternate imaginations of the limits and possibilities of the law.

Through the texts curated for this series, we will ask and think through the following questions: What did early modern forms of the use of legal procedure and documents— through cultures of petitioning—look like, in South Asia? How did cultures of petitioning enable disparate ‘publics’ to collectivise and speak to networks of socio-political power? What is the force of identity documents that allow them to produce a mass statelessness crisis through documentary regimes of citizenship? What does this in turn tell us about peoples’ refusal to allow the state the power to reduce them to their identity documents, as a form of protest? Why do women activists of the Association of Parents of Disappeared Persons in Kashmir choose to make the ‘file’—a collection of birth certificates, diplomas, and administrative paperwork—a site of their political grief and demand for accountability? What does it mean for a middle-aged Muslim man, incarcerated under charges of terror offences, to assert his dignity and humanity with a passionate claim of ‘legal’ innocence, made through letters addressed to magistrates and judges? Collectively, what do these texts tell us about the nature of the law, the state, and many ‘publics’ under modernity?

SLR kickstarts this series for the trimester by hosting their first session this week – November 26, 2025.

Session 1: Wednesday, November 26, 5–6 PM | NAB 104

Text: Rosalind O’Hanlon, ‘In the Presence of Witnesses: Petitioning and Judicial “Publics” in Western India, circa 1600–1820’ (2019) 53(1) Modern Asian Studies 52–88.

Discussant: Dr. Samyak Ghosh, Assistant Professor, NLSIU

Follow this page for further updates on upcoming sessions of the Reading Circle Series.