1 Time, waiting and gender: Everyday encounters with the state in contemporary India Introduction: Waiting for the state Time matters. But time - the forms and meanings it takes when waiting - are not experienced identically by everyone, everywhere (Appadurai, 2004; Frederiksen, 2008). This article focuses on meanings and practices of waiting encountered by poor, low-class Dalit and Muslim Indians in interactions with the state. We explore practices of waiting - around applying for paperwork, documents, cards, and welfare schemes - as constituting the materiality and temporality of citizen-state interactions. Waiting, queuing, applying and seeking signatures and approvals are, we argue, processes that generate citizenship and citizen rights, and establish fragmented forms of state power and citizens’ agency. Whilst these processes constitute the materiality of citizen-state encounters, this article explores the importance of attending to spatio-temporal dimensions embodied in waiting, as well as intersections with class, gender, caste and religion. Waiting takes various forms. Sociological scholarship has focused on long-term waiting as ‘prolonged’ or ‘chronic’ time, that may span months, years, lifetimes or even generations. This ‘chronic’ waiting has been explored in relation to un/employment (Axelsson et al, 2015; Ferguson, 2006; Jeffrey, 2010; Jeffrey and Young, 2012; Ozoliņa-Fitzgerald, 2016), migration (Conlon, 2011; Harney, 2014), asylum seeking (Griffiths, 2014; Rotter, 2015; Turnbull, 2015), prison release (Foster, 2016) and marriage (Ramdas, 2012). Here, waiting is often sustained by imagined futures, hopes and aspirations, which enable tolerance of short to medium term precariousness in the hope of better futures (Cross, 2014; Jeffrey and Young, 2012). Until then, however, this waiting is often experienced as ‘lost’ or ‘dead’ time (Jeffrey, 2008: 956). More recently, others have discussed ‘periodic’ waiting. For example, the replacement of politicians at elections with those who can be swayed as a result of their embeddedness within neighbourhood relations (Ghertner, 2017). We discuss two other variations of waiting. Short-term, or ‘on the day’ waiting, and ‘to and fro’ waiting. The former refers to time, often many hours, spent in queues or outside offices waiting to submit applications for documents or welfare schemes to state officials or local bureaucrats. This waiting often involves uncertainty and fear of being refused, being told paperwork is incorrect or being ordered to return another day. This ‘on the day’ waiting is less explored in the literature (for exceptions see Auyero, 2012 and Corbridge, 2004), yet shapes many people's everyday encounters with the state in India and elsewhere. We show how this ‘on the day’ waiting often encapsulates poor people’s interactions with local state representatives and is widely considered ‘wasted’ or ‘lost’ time’. Page 1 of 21 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 Grace Carswell, Thomas Chambers, Geert De Neve