by JINOY JOSE P.
Dear Reader,
In Kafka’s The Trial, Josef K. wakes one morning to find two strangers in his room. They tell him he is under arrest. He asks why. They don’t know. He asks to see their papers. They don’t have any. He pulls out his bicycle permit, then his birth certificate, hoping one of these will settle the matter. It settles nothing. The agents have no interest in what Josef K. can prove about himself. They are interested only in what the court has decided about him.
More than a century later, this scene has lost none of its force. Across the world, governments are tightening the terms on which a person is allowed to be who she claims to be. In India, where three new laws were passed in rapid succession in March 2026, the state has moved further into the private territory of identity—regulating religious conversion, gender recognition, and marriage in ways that put the burden of proof on the individual. But this is not only an Indian story. The question it raises is as old as political philosophy: who does the state think a person is?
Every legal system carries an implicit theory of personhood. Liberal laws that came out of the Enlightenment and were adopted unevenly across the colonised world, start from a particular assumption: that the basic unit of society is the individual. She has rights. She makes choices. She enters contracts, including marriage, on her own terms. The state exists to protect her autonomy, not to define it.
But there is an older model that never really went away. In this model, the person is not the basic unit. The family is. The caste is. The community is. A person’s identity is not self-generated but ratified—by parents, by priests, by village elders, by magistrates. You are your father’s son, your community’s member. Before you can say who you are, somebody else must confirm it.
B.R. Ambedkar understood this better than most. In Annihilation of Caste, his undelivered speech of 1936, he argued that Hindu society did not recognise the individual at all. What it recognised was the caste, the sub-caste, the family—nested circles of belonging that left no room for a person to define herself on her own terms. “In every Hindu the consciousness that exists is the consciousness of his caste,” he wrote. The individual was not merely constrained. She was, in a philosophical sense, absent. Ambedkar spent his life trying to make her present—in law, in politics, in the Constitution he drafted.
The relationship between the state and the individual has never been a settled matter. For most of human history, the question did not arise: people belonged to lords, clans, castes, congregations. The idea that a person might stand before the state as an autonomous unit, bearing rights that preceded the state, was a late and radical invention. And even then, it was partial. The French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen in 1789 spoke grandly of liberty and equality, but it took another century and a half for French women to get the vote. The Indian Constitution enshrined fundamental rights for all citizens, but personal law—governing marriage, inheritance, and family—remained divided along religious lines, each community’s patriarchs left to adjudicate the lives of their people.
The modern state was supposed to resolve this. Modernity was the promise that the individual would finally emerge from the shadow of the group. You could leave the village. You could marry whom you chose. You could change your name, faith, gender. The state’s job was to record these choices, not approve them.
What is happening in India and elsewhere is the reversal of that promise.
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