Books — Nayanika Mathur

Cambridge University Press · 2016

Paper Tiger

Law, Bureaucracy and the Developmental State in Himalayan India

What is this thing that we call the Indian state? How do ambitious development projects and legislation become real? These were the questions that guided my doctoral research, taking me to the north Indian Himalayan state of Uttarakhand in 2006.

Paper Tiger crafts a language to capture the banality and boredom of bureaucratic everydayness. It offers an ethnographic understanding of the state not as an abstract institution but as a set of affective relations and everyday practices, found in IDs, letters, paperwork, and bureaucratic rituals such as inspections, audits, and meetings.

The book traces how law becomes practice, demonstrating the many—and often unintended—forms it takes as it becomes real. It also explores the counter-intuitive effects of neoliberal demands for transparency. While rooted in extensive fieldwork within the state apparatus of Uttarakhand, Paper Tiger offers a broader way of thinking about the Indian state and the everyday life of bureaucracy.

Paper Tiger was awarded the Sharon Stephens Prize for the best first ethnography by the American Ethnological Society.

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University of Chicago Press · 2021
HarperCollins India · 2022 · South Asia edition

Crooked Cats

Beastly Encounters in the Anthropocene

Crooked Cats emerges from an early fieldwork experience of my doctoral research in the Himalaya when a “man-eating” big cat arrived in the town I was working in and went on to establish a reign of terror over it for several weeks. A similar beastly encounter took place during my post-doctoral research almost a decade on. These uncanny repetitions led me to write this book.

The book follows stories—or what I prefer to call beastly tales—of big cats that have gone crooked or are acting in ways that are increasingly unpredictable and out-of-character. It argues that crooked cats can tell us a lot about life in the Anthropocene: from how the climate crisis might be impacting animal behaviour to why the humanities and social sciences may need to rethink their methods and forms of knowledge production.

Crooked Cats received an Honourable Mention for the Gregory Bateson Book Prize from the Society for Cultural Anthropology and was longlisted for the NIF Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay Book Prize.

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