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Property as contested claims: Moral negotiations over (alleged) theft, embezzlement, and encroachment in contemporary northern India

Principal investigator: Sebastian Schwecke

In social practice, the construction of property is substantially contested. Seemingly clear-cut moral and legal definitions of property frequently obscure the contestation of property, and generate nuanced responses from parties involved. The project observes contestations in a setting that may appear unlikely at first glance – allegations of theft, embezzlement, and encroachment, each of which would often be perceived as a straightforward case of illegal acquisition of property. However, the practices observed frequently are rooted in complex moral claims to property in one or more dimensions of the latter’s social construction. Property is embedded into social structures of obligation and expectation that, in turn, are negotiated and renegotiated. Straightforwardly legal definitions of property, accordingly, are often accompanied and affected by moral claims on (limited) co-ownership. Claims on theft, embezzlement, and encroachment – wherever they are not addressing straightforwardly illegal activities – remain contentious, and constitute one of many possible moral interpretations of socially embedded notions of property.

Combining ethnography and contemporary historiography, the project studies both the moral and the legal claims on property made by contesting parties instead of their eventual resolution in law. Primarily, it relies on an archive of first information reports (FIR) filed in the north Indian town of Banaras (Varanasi), thus facilitating the study of moral discourses on property even when legal dimensions of property are addressed. Claims on theft, embezzlement, and encroachment frequently involve conflicting moral deliberations that go far beyond the straightforward acquisition of another’s property that inform much of public discourse. Often times, allegations leading to the filing of an FIR rather mark contested claims on infringements on various dimensions of complex social constructions of property claims. They constitute part of a process of weighing, negotiating, and renegotiating various dimensions of property, comprising contestations over managerial, use, and alienation rights, the obligation to ensure proper care over the object involved in property claims, and the question of individual or shared ownership – temporary or permanent, partial or comprehensive – of an asset.