Prehistory of Aadhaar: Body, Law, and Technology as Postcolonial Assemblage Itty Abraham Received: 18 June 2018 / Accepted: 2 July 2018 © 2018 Ministry of Science and Technology, Taiwan Abstract This article seeks to go beyond the binary of elite concerns over privacy versus subaltern desires for recognition to understand the huge Indian biometric pro- ject, Aadhaar. It offers a prehistory of Aadhaar, framed not in terms of rights and wrongs, important as they are, but as the most recent project in the shaping of modern social and political power through the technologically mediated intersection of the law and the body. Key moments of technopolitical reduction of the physical body— fingerprinting, DNA tests, brain scans, polygraphs, and truth serums—become turning points in a process that have joined personal identity with evidentiary truth to over- come centuries of judicial skepticism. Due to its combined technopolitical and bio- logical foundations, the new national database commands a high degree of social and political confidence as reflected in the unplanned and unforeseen expansion of Aad- haar. In this emergent database society, intersections of law, body, and technoscience engender new human networks: temporary alliances among material forces, inanimate techniques, discourses, norms, and institutions, organized around the technologically mediated body. This article proposes in conclusion that, as a result of these develop- ments, we are likely to see the generation of new and unverifiable conceptions of what we mean by and how we represent the ultimate human network, “society.” Keywords Aadhaar ▪ national database ▪ Supreme Court of India ▪ Selvi and Others v. Karnataka ▪ DNA fingerprinting ▪ brain scans ▪ polygraph ▪ truth serum Acknowledgments Earlier versions of this article were presented at the Center for Southeast Asian Studies, Kyoto University; at Tembusu College of the National University of Singapore (NUS); as a keynote lecture at the annual meeting of the Australian Sociological Association, Cairns; and as the second Sage-CRG Public Lecture, Presidency College, Kolkata. My thanks to the organizers of these events for their invita- tions and hospitality, to the digital cultures reading group at the Asia Research Institute, NUS, Lilli Irani, and to Chitra Venkataramani for her interrogations. I received excellent advice and suggestions from two anonymous reviewers, for which I am very grateful. Above all, my sincere thanks go to the keen eyes and immense patience of the organizers of this special issue and the editors of this journal. I. Abraham Southeast Asian Studies, National University of Singapore, Singapore e-mail: seaai@nus.edu.sg East Asian Science, Technology and Society: An International Journal (2018) 12:377–392 DOI 10.1215/18752160-7218326 Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/easts/article-pdf/12/4/377/553115/377abraham.pdf by guest