Surveillance in transit: a chronology of databases, power, complicity, and ‘the Aadhaar model’ in the Indian Ocean World

In this article, I trace a chronology of databases, power, complicity, and surveillance in transit across the Indian Ocean World (IOW). This chronology has produced technologies ranging from the analogue fingerprint and kipande wooden identification card to the modern-day ‘Aadhaar model’, which has travelled from India to various East African countries. From my positionality as an oppressor-caste non-Black person, I attend to the exploitative role that caste South Asians in East Africa played in producing biometric regimes – understanding complicity not just as an ethic, but a guiding methodology. How do contemporary state-sponsored databases in the IOW fit into a larger history of racial, casteist, and colonial power in the region? By what routes have surveillant technologies and frameworks transited across the Indian Ocean, over centuries? My research joins a wave of scholarship that debunks the novel spectre of data-driven policing, instead situating technologies such as the Unique Identification (UID) within a much older continuum of databases. In substance, I utilise archival methods – primary correspondences retrieved from the Indian Statistical Institute (ISI), digitized British Imperial police reports, and secondary scholarship – to clarify the role of transoceanic institutions in mass-producing surveillance technology, past and present.