The Folded Gaze: Looking at Legal Documents in South Asia

In this essay, we investigate the aesthetic and material qualities of South Asian paper, and paper-like mediums including leaves, scrolls, and cloth – and the means through which they invite the gaze. The very materiality of paper, we suggest, structures the reception and interpretation of what is written upon it. In Western bureaucracy, the transition from oral to print culture, during the 15th – 16th centuries, made use of the empty page as a surface upon which to create chart-based forms that could reduce the mediations of narrative, thereby increasing legibility and directing the gaze in an economical and forensic manner. While similar acts of transposition have taken hold in South Asian bureaucracies, largely in consequence of Western colonial practices, we claim that South Asian material practices persist in giving contemporary paper documents a different significance. Our essay considers the artifice enabled by paper and its precursors – not through abstract demonstrations of sovereignty, but through the immanent capacities of paper for rolling, folding, and covering. That legal authority can be represented through the grand symbolism of office (coats of arms; state emblems) has been analysed by recent scholars. Our concern, however, is with the corporeal and visual, with handling and viewing, and with way documents can be manipulated in ways that betray their power. Picking up paper from the ancient, medieval, colonial and contemporary periods, across South Asia, we investigate the palm-leaf printed manuscript, calligraphic documents, and other paper forms, while also attending to the present-day documentary practices of litigants in the Indian lower courts.