Feeling the rules: Documentary practices of rationing and the 'signature' of the official

This article seeks to find the metaphorical signature' of the food official in the intricate materialities of everyday life and particularly, in one such familiar realm, the production of documents. While doing so, this article considers the worlds of instinct, emotion and conscience as well as kinship and family in shaping official roles and welfare processes. This article argues that documentary practices of rationing provided the space for the self-fashioning of food officials who animatedly fleshed out their parts in enacting various regulations and injunctions. This article also attempts to lay out the postcolonial framework of food distribution through an ethnographic study of documentary forms and practices around the rationing document within what used to be the Union Territory of Delhi from 1965 to 1990.