Peopled Infrastructure and Outlaw Sovereignty: Cooking Gas Takes to a Life of Crime

ABSTRACT: This article examines how some infrastructures become volatile terrains for negotiating sovereignty and legality. With the concept of "peopled infrastructure," I show what features of an infrastructure complicate its use as a tool of discipline, and with "outlaw sovereignty," I discuss how infrastructures get co-opted by strongmen to assert their local authority. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in an urban village in north India, I analyze the illicit distribution of Liquefied Petroleum Gas (LPG, used for cooking) as an infrastructure governed not only by state actors and oil companies, but by dominant caste men who perform local power through illegality. They appropriate LPG delivery networks to consolidate caste authority and display masculine bravado, enabled by complicity with parastatal institutions and state actors. The peopled character of the infrastructure transforms a national disciplinary and developmental project into a chaotic site of negotiation, allowing outlaw sovereignty to thrive alongside – not in opposition to – state power. Rather than romanticize this informality as emancipatory, I demonstrate how local hierarchies of caste and gender reformulate the logics of the infrastructure and enhance everyday inequality.