Messy bureaucracies

In Government of paper, Matthew Hull has given us one of the most finely grained, ethnographically rich analyses of the role of material artifacts in the working of states. His focus on files, maps, the parchi and the petition, and lists and land records, is a sorely needed addition to the ethnographic record. As a linguistic anthropologist, he is uniquely positioned to reflect on the linguistic properties of such documents; as a broadly-trained sociocultural anthropologist, he is able to tease out the social and political implications of how these inscriptions function in the social world, what they enable people to do, and how their materiality limits their possible uses and their possible users. This book also sets up very interesting comparative possibilities for research about the state in South Asia. For example, although Hull's concerns are not identical to those raised in my recent book on Indian bureaucracy, Red tape (2012), it is interesting to read both books to ask the question of how much difference the postcolonial histories of India and Pakistan have made to their respective bureaucracies. On the one hand, the continuities exhibited by the two bureaucracies in the wake of colonial rule are truly astonishing. It has been more than sixty years since the subcontinent achieved Independence. In that time, a minirevolution has taken place in organizing and running offices. Handwriting was first replaced by typewritten documents, and then computers substituted typewriters. Techniques of filing moved from tying bundles of paper within a cardboard cover secured by tape and stored horizontally, to papers being stored in tabbed folders open on one side and stored vertically in filing cabinets, to electronic files being stored on computers and backed up in the cloud and on hard drives. Government bureaucracies in all three countries in British India (Pakistan,