Teh (تہ) – Illegible by Design

Opacity as method, memory as resistance.

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When Visibility Becomes a Condition

Teh (تہ) is a word from Urdu and Persian that evokes folds, layers, or a base, something held close, concealed, or partially revealed. It gestures toward ways of knowing and structuring space that begin not with exposure, but with discretion.

This note emerges from Lagori Collective’s South Asian Futures framework, which foregrounds regional relations, rhythm, and refusal traditions as future-forming capacities. In a world increasingly structured around visibility as verification, it asks what it might mean to design for opacity as infrastructure.

Across our civic design, governance, and research work, we’ve encountered a recurring threshold: visibility has become a precondition for recognition. People are increasingly asked to make themselves legible to receive aid, claim land, or even grieve to be seen, sorted, and located within systems that promise care but often deliver control.

In South Asia, from Sindh to Sylhet, from Vanni to Nagaland, visibility is rarely neutral. It is shaped by design. It becomes both the gateway to support and the entry point for intervention. What can be seen is tagged and tracked. What is tracked becomes actionable. In Jharkhand, Adivasi communities invoked Pathalgadi not only as a protest but as a boundary, resisting systems that would convert forest relationships into claim forms. In Sri Lanka’s Vanni district, Tamil families tend unmarked memorial sites, intentionally left off maps to avoid demolition. Among Garo communities in Bangladesh, forest access is governed by memory rather than maps, a system that protects by withholding.

These are not exceptions. They are systems of governance built on relation, discretion, and embedded knowledge rather than circulation or verification. Yet most institutional infrastructures, from the state to philanthropic organisations, operate on a single principle: if we cannot see it, we cannot support it.

As a result, we build platforms that promise voice but reward coherence. We create maps that claim participation but demand simplification. We measure inclusion by visibility and invisibility by failure.

Teh begins as a refusal of that frame. It is not opposed to mapping or knowledge-sharing. But it insists that care should not require conversion. Memory need not be processed into metrics. And not all systems must begin with exposure. Sometimes, remaining partially unknown is not a failure of governance. It is a principle of design.

The Infrastructure of Legibility

Legibility is often framed as a moral imperative, the first essential step toward justice. If a settlement can be mapped, it can be governed. If a community can be counted, it can be served. If a crisis can be documented, it can be addressed. But this logic rests on a dangerous fiction: that simplification safeguards what it reveals.

Across South Asia, legibility has become the mechanism through which life is translated into categories the state can process. A D-Khata (ಡಿ ಖಾತಾ) holder in Karnataka, a Khatian (খতিয়ান) number in Bengal and Bangladesh, a Samurdhi (සමෘද්ධි) beneficiary in Sri Lanka, a Janajati (जनजाति) certificate bearer in Nepal, a Benami (بے نامی) landholder in Pakistan, a Zakat list (যাকাত তালিকা) recipient in Bangladesh, each of these state-readable codes flattens layered identities, erases embedded relations, and converts memory into eligibility. Once categorised, lives become measurable, fundable, governable, and vulnerable to redesign.

To become eligible for protection, people must first become intelligible within systems built for classification, not relation. Memory is turned into a title when the ancestral land must be documented for conservation. Movement becomes code when migratory routes are mapped for climate planning. Even so-called participatory tools like geospatial dashboards, open data portals, and community surveys invite contribution only within the limits of what the system can read. They rarely honour knowledge that resists formatting. The result is not just epistemic loss. It is infrastructural capture.

What cannot be encoded becomes anecdotal, what cannot be extracted becomes informal, and what cannot be scaled becomes irrelevant. Cycles guided by scent, soil, or lunar intervals are dismissed as background culture, not governance logic. They are legible only to those who live within their rhythms. In most systems, embeddedness is treated as bias.

The bureaucratic imagination also runs on time. Monitoring and evaluation frameworks demand currency. Data must be recent, regular, and replicable. But governance shaped by Teh follows different rhythms. It moves with flood pulses, fasting days, and ancestral anniversaries. When loss unfolds in ritual time but funding is tied to calendar time, the result is not just misalignment. It is disappearance.

In coastal Tamil Nadu, digital compensation processes often overlook the timing of traditional rituals like memorial walks and rebuilding rites aligned with lunar calendars. When funding cycles close before these practices begin, communities are left without recourse. Cultural wounds go unacknowledged. Grief remains unsupported. This is not just a failure of timing. It is a collapse of fit. Because what these systems cannot recognise cannot be sustained.

Teh in Practice: Relation Without Revelation

In dominant civic paradigms, refusal is often interpreted as risk. What is not visible is treated as a gap, a sign that something must be fixed, formalised, or brought into view. But invisibility is not always absence. In many contexts, it is a method of protection.

In the Chittagong Hill Tracts of Bangladesh, indigenous communities like the Chakma and Marma maintain land boundaries through oral traditions and planting cycles. Their stewardship resists formal mapping, preserving a connection to land that is both spiritual and practical. In Nepal, farmer-managed irrigation systems, known as kulo, operate through collective memory and rotational water-sharing agreements. These systems function effectively without formal oversight, relying on trust, seasonality, and embedded rhythm. In Balochistan, pastoralist communities follow migratory routes shaped by forage and water availability. These paths are preserved through generational knowledge and remain unrecorded, protecting them from external disruption. This logic is echoed in traditional medicinal systems. Ayurveda, for example, embodies knowledge passed down through generations, emphasizing balance and holistic well-being. These systems, rooted in observation and experience, often resist standardization, highlighting the value of relational understanding over empirical quantification

These are not remnants of the past. They are civic systems shaped by responsibility rather than visibility. They persist not despite the absence of documentation, but because they are held orally, ritually, and rhythmically in ways that resist institutional formatting.

Teh does not romanticise these systems. It does not claim they are perfect or pure. But, it insists that many such forms of governance are not informal. They are deeply structured. Just not in formats designed to be extracted or exported.

Tension emerges when these relational systems encounter institutions that recognise only what circulates. A forest custom must be turned into a policy step to receive support. A mourning practice must be recorded to qualify for compensation. The outcome is rarely inclusion. More often, it is distortion.

Teh reminds us that not all knowledge is transferable. Some forms are illegible by intent because they are built on relation. And relation does not scale. It moves differently. It anchors through presence, through memory, through time, not through systems of replication.

This is not a call for mystification. It is an invitation to treat opacity as a civic grammar, a way of holding knowledge in place, not always pushing it into circulation. What protects many communities is not how widely their systems are known, but how wisely they are kept.

In the forests of Chhattisgarh, resistance did not rely on spectacle or presence. As Arundhati Roy recounts in her book, “Walking with the Comrades,” after spending time with Adivasi communities navigating conflict and displacement, she experienced how survival often depended on remaining untraceable. The forest itself became a strategy. Here, Teh was not an idea. It was a way of being. In such lived strategies, the ethos of Teh is most sharply felt.

Teh as Design and Governance Principle

If Teh challenges visibility as the default grammar of support, what does it offer in return?

It begins elsewhere. With governance that does not start from capture. With design that values discretion over disclosure. With infrastructure that trusts in rhythm, relation, and presence, even when presence cannot be plotted.

To design with Teh is to reject the idea that what cannot be standardised is unreliable. It starts from a different premise: that in many places, survival depends not on exposure but on embeddedness, on being known in ways that do not circulate. Teh treats discretion not as the opposite of accountability, but as a different theory of trust.

Most institutional design is built on verification. If something can be seen, it can be audited. If it can be counted, it can be funded. This logic assumes that justice flows through exposure and that visibility ensures protection.

But in many systems, the opposite holds. Protection emerges from being quietly held through ritual, rotation, or rhythm. These systems endure not because they are documented, but because they are remembered and rooted.

Friction arises when these systems meet institutions that require visibility. Platforms demand tags. Funders seek indicators. Procurement frameworks ask for traceability. A practice that unfolds in lunar intervals is marked as non-compliant. Knowledge that is shared collectively but not codified is treated as unreliable. Memory that cannot be flattened into standard form is flagged as a risk. Yet these systems do not fail to govern. They govern through tempo, through narrative, through trust.

Teh does not call for disengagement. It calls for reorientation. A shift from audit to accompaniment. From coverage to consent. From managing knowledge to protecting the conditions that allow it to remain whole. It is not a pause in governance. It is a principle that recognises how some of the most enduring forms of care survive by remaining partially held and never fully revealed.

Opacity is not ignorance. It is structure. It is a form of trust, a strategy of protection, a refusal to let knowledge become currency.

Rethinking Mapping-for-Good

Not all mapping is extractive. Much of it begins in care. Participatory GIS tools, community dashboards, cultural inventories, and open-source disaster platforms are often created to surface what has long been erased. They are used to fight dispossession, advocate for relief, reclaim land memory, and assert presence in systems that have actively denied it.

At Lagori, we have only just begun to engage with these practices. My colleague Reema is exploring counter-mapping as a way to surface how space is remembered, claimed, and held through relation. The few times I have listened to her speak about what she’s thinking, certain questions have come up for me: What does a map protect? What does it expose? And what might be lost in the very act of making something visible?

Even the most careful maps, once created, begin to circulate. They move beyond the conditions in which they were formed and enter systems that reward visibility over relation. A resilience map might later justify infrastructure that displaces. A sacred site inventory may invite heritage tourism or surveillance. A cultural dashboard could be scraped into a funding deck, stripped of context, and turned into aesthetic signal.

The danger is not always in mapping itself. It lies in the infrastructures that absorb the map. What begins as testimony can become currency. What starts as a refusal can become data. Even maps made in solidarity are rarely immune. Once visibility is produced, it rarely remains with those who offered it.

Teh asks us to pause before mapping begins. It does not reject representation entirely. It asks what kind of knowledge is being surfaced, on whose terms, and for whose use. Mapping often demands more than coordinates. It asks for stories, meanings, and thresholds. And once thresholds are made visible, they can become vulnerable. Visibility does not always protect. Sometimes, it invites harm.

Across the region, there are practices that hold place, grief, or memory in forms not meant to be rendered. In the Maldives, oral navigation routes pass from one generation to the next through rhythm, gesture, and celestial orientation. These routes are not mapped because their reliability depends on being lived, not charted. In Afghanistan, certain Sufi lineages conduct seasonal ziyarat (زيارة) pilgrimages to remote shrines. The routes, timings, and stops are passed through trust and proximity, not publication. These choices are not gaps. They are methods of protection.

Teh reframes withdrawal not as absence, but as intention. It proposes restraint. A recognition that some things are safeguarded precisely by remaining unrendered. Justice, in many of these contexts, does not depend on exposure. It depends on consent, on memory, and on forms of presence that do not circulate.

Teh does not ask institutions to stop mapping. It asks them to reconsider what is mapped, who holds it, and whether some things are better left off the record. Designing with Teh begins not with “Can it be mapped?” but with the harder question: “Should it?”

Sketches for the Future: A Design Grammar of Illegibility

What follows are five glimpses of governance differently held and sketched not as scalable models, but as relational architectures. These are not speculative futures. They are fragments of systems already alive, stretched forward, layered with Teh. Each sketch responds to a recurring friction: what happens when embedded civic worlds meet infrastructures that demand visibility.

Folding Maps (Ritual cartographies that disappear with time)

Some maps are not made to last. In many places, people mark their environment only for a moment, just long enough to guide, protect, or remember. Folding Maps are temporary by design. They honour memory without turning it into a record, and disappear before they can be extracted.

Imagine a camel herder collective in the Rann of Kutch, Gujarat. Each year, they paint seasonal routes onto cloth using sap that fades in sunlight. They show water spots, salt breaks, and danger zones. By the end of summer, the cloth is folded and buried. When a conservation NGO arrives to digitise the routes for planning, the herders offer a version from years past. “That one served its time,” they say. “We’ve already let it go.” The NGO uploads it anyway. A month later, trucks arrive to lay a new track through the land. The map now outlives the memory it was meant to serve.

Memory-Led Tenure Systems (Grief and governance through enactment)

Some communities do not record land claims in documents, but enact them through ritual and remembrance. Memory-Led Tenure is a way of holding land not as property, but as responsibility. Rights are renewed through practice, not paperwork.

Imagine a river island settlement in the northern Char areas of Bangladesh. Each monsoon, land shifts and boundaries dissolve. When the waters recede, families walk the newly emerged land together, marking out fields with stories and offerings. A government team arrives with drones and maps to assess ownership for disaster relief. The community invites them to join the walk. A footprint marks the threshold of one family's claim. It is enough for them. But it is not enough for the system. Compensation is delayed. The map does not recognise what the community already knows.

Discretion Registries (Relational systems of access and knowledge sharing)

In some places, access is not public or permanent. It is given through trust, timing, and shared need. Discretion Registries are distributed systems of knowledge. They do not centralise or store, but hold information within relationships.

Imagine a forest-edge village in the Lower Churia hills of eastern Nepal. Knowledge of sacred groves, flood escapes, and medicinal plants is held by elders and passed through seasonal initiations. A climate-tech pilot proposes to build a resilience dashboard. The community cautiously agrees. They share tree species and seasonal indicators, but withhold key thresholds. When the dashboard launches, funders question the gaps. An elder responds, “If we told you everything, you’d stop asking. And you’d stop coming.”

Threshold Councils (Negotiated exposure and collective filtering)

Not all knowledge is meant to be open. Some must be filtered, questioned, or held back. Threshold Councils are rotating groups that decide what crosses the boundary of visibility. They act as civic membranes, making discretion a collective right.

Imagine a mining-affected Adivasi group in Odisha’s Keonjhar district. An environmental NGO offers support to document local biodiversity. The council agrees to share details about certain forest species, but withholds stories linked to ancestral migration and ritual access. Months later, even this partial information appears in a policy brief. It is presented without the context that gave it meaning and used to support an external advocacy narrative. What the council had offered as situated knowledge is reframed as general data, detached from the relationships that shaped it. In response, the council revokes access. A year later, they form a new partnership with clearer terms. This time, the map is co-created with multiple thresholds.

Opacity Protocols for Platforms (Platforms that refuse permanence)

Most platforms are built to make things visible. But not all communities want their data stored, shared, or frozen in time. Opacity Protocols are design principles that make forgetting possible. They create space for seasonal knowledge, partial access, and time-bound visibility.

Imagine a coastal fishing cooperative in southern Sindh, Pakistan. With local designers, they build a digital app that shows a weather and spawning calendar. It activates only during specific tidal periods. At other times, it appears blank. A donor requests full-time access to extract seasonal trend data. The cooperative shares a login hidden within a folktale, trusting that this indirection preserves control. Eventually, the donor deciphers the entry point and circulates the data beyond its intended context, removing the rhythms and relations that gave it meaning. The cooperative decides to disable the app entirely. Once discretion is breached, the platform no longer serves its role. The data was never the point. What mattered was who could access it, when, and on whose terms.

These sketches ask to be sensed. Each one holds a form of knowledge that does not begin with visibility, and cannot survive standardisation. Together, they offer a grammar of governance rooted in discretion, temporality, and trust. They remind us that opacity is not a failure of systems but a different way of holding them together.

Not A Conclusion

Sometimes, the most enduring forms of care do not declare themselves. They walk with us, vanish with the rains, whisper through ritual, or scatter like seeds that do not germinate on command. They linger in gestures, silences, and cycles that resist formatting. They may not be legible but they are practised.

Teh does not ask us to abandon systems. It asks us to reimagine what they are built to hold. Teh insists that opacity is not a flaw in governance. It is a structure of trust. A politics of protection. A form of memory that refuses translation. A method of care that endures precisely because it remains partially held.

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Dhaval Kothari is a design researcher, strategist, and co-founder of Lagori Collective. Lagori is an interdisciplinary research and design lab in South Asia that advances futures thinking and participatory innovation through collaborative projects, community programming, and strategic foresight. Dhaval applies futures thinking to address broader social issues, while retooling systems to better anticipate and prepare for emerging challenges. He is particularly focused on building a South Asian lens for futures and foresight work.

Notes From In Between is a record of our in-progress thinking, provocations, open questions, and ongoing experiments at Lagori’s Social Design Lab. It’s where we make our process public, not to present answers, but to invite conversation. Check out our two Notes From In Between - Mausam, Jivrut and Beejaya.