Papers, cards, and perilous encounters with the state 21 that there was a foreigner in the area who was interested in Rohingya documents, and he had brought one to show me. The tired and hungry faces of the interpreters dropped a little, but out of respect for their elder they resigned themselves to one last interview. As the gentleman, Gulam, carefully unrolled his document, their reluctance gave way to an intense interest. In turn, they gently and silently ran their fingers down the parchment deciphering its old Burmese script, and then erupted into excited chatter that caused other nearby refugees to lean over the bamboo wall in curiosity. It was a land tenure document belonging to Gulam’s ancestors issued by the British colonial administration for the year 1917–8. It detailed the uses of a plot of agricultural land by his Rohingya relatives in northern Maungdaw close to the Indian border. The document was in pristine condition complete with a 1 Anna stamp bearing the head of King George V.3 Gulam understood that the document had no legal or administrative value—his family, who had remained in the same village until they were expelled in 2017, had passed this land on for other villagers to farm several decades earlier. However, he explained, it was one of his most valued possessions. ‘I am a citizen of Burma and I have the right to belong to the land of Arakan. This document shows that. It is like a map of where we (Rohingya) belong,’ he told us. My young interpreters cradled the document in their hands and nodded vigorously. It was clear that the document was not only of value to him but also to other Rohingya around him who had an intense thirst for the history of their own people, in particular, for written artefacts and evidence of their past relationships with the states and kingdoms that have governed Rohingya areas. As noted in Chapter 1, a key aspect of Rohingya identity and citizenship that has been denied by Myanmar State institutions is the sense of historical belonging to the land; this document proved Rohingya ties to the land prior to independence. The importance of documents is accentuated by a sense of loss that marks the absence of other documents—whether ones that have been seized, destroyed, or never issued as a result of targeted policies. As Gulam explained, ‘the NaSaKa4 took them (Rohingyas’ identity documents) away . . . so today they have lost those documents—and it is important to keep these kinds of important historical documents.’ State-issued documents are material objects of law and policy (Hull 2012; Sadiq 2016) and, as Gulam understood, they can be important artefacts of the state (Sadiq 2009). There is a growing body of historically contextualised social science research on statecraft that centres on state-issued documents and paperwork as artefacts that provide insights into how states produce and reproduce nationhood, citizenship, and statelessness through bureaucratic and administrative procedures, and in particular through identity schemes such as identity cards and (biometric) data collection (Caplan and Torpey 2001; Bennet and Lyon 2008; Chhotray and McConnell 2018). Much of this literature draws on Scott’s work (1998:65–71) on the categorisation and registration of individuals making populations visible and ‘legible’ to the state