This paper reflects on my involvement in the bureaucratic processes of resolving complicated civil registration cases in Nepal’s local government. The article draws on my ongoing doctoral fieldwork on the government’s civil registration work (in Nepali, panjikaran), based primarily in Nawalpur district, Gandaki province. The tasks that fall under Panjikaran, which are mainly based in the ward offices, include registering vital life events such as births, marriages, divorces, deaths and migrations, and issuing the relevant certificates. These certificates also serve as important supporting documents for applying for Nepali citizenship. With the Nepali state’s ongoing efforts to build increasingly strict and digitally-based systems of civil registration, this long-standing but changing area of governance offers an under-researched window into the inner workings of Nepal’s local government. This is particularly the case when it comes to complicated cases whose resolution goes beyond standard bureaucratic protocols.

This article will begin by briefly recounting my experience of closely accompanying a young woman as she made repeated visits to the district administration to apply for a birth certificate after many years of delay. Despite the complicity of the case, which is entangled in family disputes and contradictory bureaucratic loopholes, her family repeatedly emphasizes the need for her to speak for herself (wu aafaile bolnu parchha), as if to suggest that the key to resolving the issue is for her to speak for herself. I will discuss how, for me, this notion of ‘aafaile bolne’ went from being an unreasonable demand made by others, to something that I also used to ‘lecture’ my interlocutor.

This article then discusses how, despite my contestations, some in the local government praised my contribution to the resolution of this case. Particularly, such comments highlight my labour of walking to the ward office, as depicted in the image ‘gham ma hidne’ (walking in the sun/heat). It is precisely this act of physically travelling to and presenting oneself at the office, I suggest, together with the act of speaking (aafaile bolne), that is central to understanding the experience with ward offices in dealing with complicated civil registration cases.

This link between speaking and walking/moving, as I suggest in the last section, can be well captured by the phrase ‘aagadi bolnu’ (to speak in front). A single mother, who successfully invoked the newly amended citizenship law to obtain citizenship for her son, articulated to me the importance of ‘aagadi bolnu’ in pushing forward the complicated and ambiguous bureaucratic process. This image of individuals coming forward to speak for themselves resonates with the phenomenon of ‘raising the voice’ (awaj uthaune), analysed by anthropologist Laura Kunreuther (2018) in the context of Kathmandu in the 1990s and early 2000s. I will show how my embedded involvement in the young woman’s birth certificate case, during which I unexpectedly took on certain responsibilities and thus shared both her physical and emotional labour, compels me to look at the image of ‘aagadi bolne’ from a new perspective, beyond the celebration of an independent, liberal, and democratic subjectivity.