The (Illegal) Citizen

The (illegal) Citizen

The binary figures of the citizen and the criminal appear pretty early on in any law student's life, and stays on as a familiar companion as s/he traverses through the complex world of law and legality. This experimental course attempts to interrogate the troubled relationship between the figure of the lawful contractual abiding citizen and its subterranean other, the illegal citizen.

Who or what is this illegal citizen, and what place does it have in a law school curriculum? The illegal citizen is a troublesome figure who is present everywhere and yet invisible from official histories. This course attempts to unravel some of the mysterious places where this illegal citizen resides, and in the course of discovering these ordinary but hidden spaces, attempt to question our assumptions of the habitation of the citizen itself.

The emergence of the category of the citizen is often seen as the movement away from traditional categories of allegiance like religion, locality, family, caste etc., into the modern secular category of the Citizen, whose allegiance is only to an abstract idea of the nation. The citizen is then the unmarked individual, with constitutionally guaranteed rights of equality, access and participation in democratic processes. In the Indian context the history of the citizen is clearly tied to the project of the nation, "the largest imagined space which claimed the nomenclature of the new, or at least with the Utopian projection of the ideal community, freed from colonial domination, and free to create a world untainted by inequalities of caste-class, community or gender. It was a community, however, only of those who were eligible to be citizens, and the question of how citizenship was conferred is in many ways the same question as how the nation was imaged. Nationalism was a marker of the readiness to enter the modern age, and the modern person produced as "Indian" was also the free, agentive, romantic subject of liberal humanism"(Niranjana, 1993)

The citizen therefore serves as the ultimate site of various fantasies; the fantasy of planned and orderly development, the citizen as the law abiding individual with civic consciousness, the citizen as the bearer of constitutional rights and duties etc. M P Jain's chapter on fundamental rights in his boon on The Indian constitution for instance is entitled, The Six fundamental rights of citizens.

But any search for this ideal citizen subject almost immediately lands us in trouble, and we are forced to venture through all kinds of dingy alleys of illegality; the slum dweller who refuses to vacate, the hawker who bribes his way through to secure a daily spot, adding to the already rampant corruption, the hijra sex worker who creates public nuisance by her excessive activities, the VCD pirate who supplies illicit pornography in shady markets, the illegal migrant adding to the list of "not-quite citizens, with not-yet passports, and not-there addresses" (Raqs, 2003).

These figures of transgression and illegality pose fundamental challenges to our neat categories of the liberal public sphere were citizens interact through constitutionally guaranteed rights, as the exclusive mode of understanding the world of law and legality. The status of these transgressors as the ‘not quite’ and yet ‘not quiet’ citizens creating their own avenues of participation in the multiple worlds of the city, sexuality, media and modernity demand that we ask fundamentally different questions of the relationship between law, legality and that which we call citizenship. The task of this experimental course is to ask these question, without necessarily expecting any easy answers.

Why do we call this an experimental course? The act of experimenting requires a willingness to try out and test new formulations, chart unfamiliar territory and the ability to be surprised. The formal requirements of a planned syllabus often leave us little space to pose questions, as the demands for answers is overwhelming. This course is an experiment because we would like to pose the question of what it means to teach interventions or research projects which are ongoing. We have in the course of our work at the Alternative Law Forum made friends with some of these denizens, and we would like to introduce them to our wider circle of friends.

Course Structure

1. Posing the problem- Who / What is a citizen? (4 hrs)- ALF Collective •Introductory Session- Figures of citizenship- Who or what is a citizen •The citizen and its subterranean other

Readings a.Etienne Balibar, Citizen Subject b.Sudipto Kaviraj, The imaginary institution of India, Subaltern Studies Vol. VII c.Partha Chatterjee, Post colonial civil and political society from Sudipta Kaviraj and Sunil Khilnani, Civil society d.Vivek Dhareshwar, Rowdysheeters: An essay on sublaternity and politics from Subaltern Studies Reader, Vol. IX e.Alain Duarand Lasserve, Coping with illegality in human settlements

1. Claiming the City (8hrs)- CliftonD Rozario 3.Citizenship, Modernity and the Public Sphere (8hrs) Lawrence Liang 4.Sexual Citizenship (8hrs) Arvind Narrain 5.Communities as Citizens (8hrs) Arvind narrain & Geetanjali 6.Understanding Multiple Citizenship (4 hrs) ALF Collective