Who Listens for the State? Sunwai and the Production of Political Trust In Delhi's Unauthorized Colonies
Shagun Gupta
Assistant Professor in the Department of Government and Law
Lafayette College
Cosponsored with the South Asia Working Group.
The paper focuses on the politics of being heard where the state rarely speaks, and how trust in local institutions is sustained through the social labor of listening, narration, and mediated encounter. Drawing on in-depth ethnographic fieldwork across 30 unauthorized colonies (a type of informal settlement) in the Badarpur constituency of Southeast Delhi, this paper shows that trust is not merely a response to what the state does, but to how its actions are interpreted, narrated, and made intelligible through local intermediaries. Central to this process is the mechanism of sunwai – an embodied, iterative, and relational form of informational audience, wherein residents are not only recipients of state performance signals, but also co-producers of meaning around those signals.