System Update: Biometric Surveillance, Facial Recognition Technology, and AI Ethics in India, 1858–2022

Abstract

Recent literature within the field of Surveillance Studies has foregrounded the questions of continuity and rupture between colonial and contemporary biometrics across the Global South. However, while growing bodies of scholarship have attended to fingerprinting under the Indian British Raj as well as 21st-century Facial Recognition Technology (FRT) in the West, little energy has been devoted to tracing the relationship between casteist-colonial biometrics and modern FRTs, specifically, in India. In this thesis, I aim to make that chronology legible. I argue that contemporary Hindu nationalist India, with its enthusiasm for FRTs and new legal codes based on colonial ordinances, is rapidly developing as a new and dangerous testing ground for digital surveillance in pursuit of ethnofascist violence against Muslim communities: instead of discrete accounts emphasizing either the contemporary or colonial history of surveillance, what we need today is a timeline capturing the evolution of biometrics (analog and digital) as an instrument of policing in India over the last two centuries, from the Sepoy Mutiny/Insurgency of 1857 to the 2022 Criminal Procedure (Identification) bill. Outlining these continuities makes clear that digital technologies of biometric surveillance, such as FRT, are largely rearticulations of what has already been, this time in service of a new political project; long has existed in India the deeply-rooted political, cultural, and legal grammar of casted criminality and body-technologies, which now can easily absorb and re-render modern developments in innovation. My historical interrogation in short points us towards understanding the emergence of FRT in modern India as nothing more than a "system update," a twenty-first century iteration of entrenched structures of Brahminical colonialism rather than a new form of technology or politics altogether.

Based on archival, ethnographic, and legal analysis of biometric surveillance and criminality in India, I recontextualize FRT in a continuum that spans Brahminical notions of crime, colonial technologies of race science, and neoliberal-capitalist orders of digital development today. Such an analysis has discursive ramifications for AI Ethics as a sub-field as well. By implicating Hindu upper-casteness as an active site of complicity over the last few centuries, I ask about the (im)possibilities of an Indian AI Ethics and reorient instead towards refusal and hopelessness as more generative sites for abolitionist ethical practice. More broadly, this line of inquiry generalizes to discourses of AI across the Global South, making resoundingly clear that AI Ethics must be attentive to the nuanced social histories of regional power, post-colonial complicity, and technology, rather than positioning "decolonization" as an empty moral imperative.