was going on even as the events of murders unfolded over four days, when you could not know in advance which words might betray and which words might save you, your children, your neighbor – is a difficulty of blockages to thought or blockages to living. The response through drawing on mythology and ritual might not be “thought” in the sense that Diamond wants philosophy to respond, but perhaps at the level of the everyday, it was better than “thought.” Could mythology and ritual then manage to avoid the disappointment with the forms rational arguments take? Or in other words, could one claim that human expressiveness here finds routes to these difficulties of reality?
It is interesting to me that Diamond does not take up the other registers in Coetzee’s novel – for instance the texture of interactions within the domestic scenes when Mrs. Costello realizes that the grandchildren are eating in the playroom because they are going to have chicken soup, and their grandmother does not like meat on the table while their mother does not want to make any concessions to what she calls with obvious irony, her mother-in-law’s “delicate sensitivities.” In what way would these quotidian interactions change the feeling of abuse that pervades the lecture hall? Mrs. Costello’s disappointments are with the philosophers. At one point in the novel she says “Even Immanuel Kant of whom I would have expected better, has a failure of nerve at this point. Even Kant does not pursue, with regard to animals, the implications of his intuition that reason may be not the being of the universe but on the contrary merely the being of the human brain” (Coetzee 2003: 67).
What Diamond makes of this impulse in the novel, however, is something more than the fact that philosophers disappoint her. It is thinking itself which fails in the face of these difficulties of reality. But what if we asked, but how do people live with or endure such knowledge?
I have seen evidence that makes me put aside the faith in abstract reasoning or in thought experiments to address this particular range of issues pertaining to the moral responsibilities we have to other humans and to animals; I trust simply that, faced with such inordinate knowledge, people did what they could in the circumstances that they found themselves in. I recall the way in which the pressure generated by policemen to provide false witness against the accused arrested under terror laws was resisted (not always successfully) as families would send homemade food, a hand-knitted scarf, a letter, a picture drawn by a child, across the prison walls made up of brick and mortar, and of the thick lattice of police procedures, knowing full well that the prisoner will be mocked for these, that these gifts would be seized on one pretext or another, but willing the prisoner to know that he is loved. This is the register of words, gestures, and their physiognomy that I have tried to give expression to in this work. As an anthropologist and in fidelity to those in these urban slums I have come to know, I would say that the power of such gestures and of words as gestures is that they do not engage in the kinds of arguments Mrs. Costello was confronted with during the course of her lecture. After all, they have to live in neighborhoods in which your next-door neighbor might be a police informer; or, it may be a kinsman who gave false evidence against your husband or son in a terror trial either out of fear or because of greed; or, a child might say something that would identify a secret you were trying to hide from the police and so words have to be guarded, or perhaps covered up with euphemisms. But in the very ways in which excess of expression and concealment of it are made part of these lives, they testify to the different ways in which people learn to live with inordinate knowledge.
The Next Chapters
The following chapters are not organized around each of these issues separately – rather the questions I opened the book with run through the book like streams that run into each other throughout. I give here, a brief account of what to expect in the following chapters.
Chapter 2, “The Catastrophic Event: Enduring Inordinate Knowledge,” analyzes the manner in which catastrophic events, namely the Bombay successive blasts in March 1993 and the Bombay train bomb blasts of 2006, unfold within the law, asking what kinds of police practices do these events bring to light? Such practices, I argue, fracture not only individual lives but also the life of the community. At the level of the law, I analyze the vast number of documents produced in the process of terror trials of the 1993 bomb blasts in the TADA11 courts and show that a focus away from the final judgment to the more minor documents such as police affidavits, bail petitions, petitions opposing extension of police custody, as well as confessions elicited from the accused, reveal the fictions of the law. A close reading of these documents yields important insights into the judicial processes through which torture can take place right under the eyes of the judges and within the legal processes itself. Although very few legal scholars would now accept Bentham’s characterization of common law fictions as “wicked falsehoods,” not every type of conceptual construction can be brought under the label of a legal fiction (see Del Mar and Twining 2015). The chapter shows in some detail how specific devices of fiction, such as plot, character, and chronotope, are used to create a story of conspiracy which even if it is not upheld for all the accused over time, nevertheless produces enough opportunities for torture, intimidation, harassment of the accused and their respective kin and friends, while also blurring the distinction between a suspect and a witness.
The second moment of the argument in the chapter is an exposition of a stunning book written by Abdul Wahid Shaikh who was one of the accused in the bomb blasts of July 11, 2006 (popularly known as 7/11), in which there was a simultaneous explosion of seven bombs planted in the train plying between Churchgate and Virar stations of Western railways in Mumbai. I argue that this book demonstrates the importance of vernacular writings that I honor for informing social theory. Written as a pedagogy of the oppressed, and drawing from experiences of Muslim subjects brought into the grip of law and subjected to torture, Abdul Wahid Shaikh’s book is a manual for how to behave under torture, how to withdraw your words when needed, and when to shout them out, even if they are going unheard. Begunah Qaidi (The innocent prisoner) does not provide a learned genealogy of techniques of torture of the kind that Rejali (2007) provides in his meticulously researched book on torture and democracy, but it has an eye for detail that shows the cunning of the social character of torture as technique within the judicial process. To take a simple example, many English-speaking people when in a police station might easily miss the patta, the leather belt hanging in police stations that are used normally in mechanical grinders. These are used to beat up suspects and there is a black humor in the inscriptions on these belts, recalling titles of popular Bollywood films. But the existence and use of such pattas was common knowledge among many who lived in the slums. Some of these people might have actually experienced a beating at the hands of an inebriated policeman before being let off with the offering of a bribe. Others might have just heard rumors about such objects. Still others knew how these kinds of punishments might morph into second- or third-degree torture if they became implicated in an infamous case that went beyond local petty crimes. Shaikh’s book describes such events with a clinical detachment and provides a more convincing refutation of the learned discourses on justifications for torture offered by law professors of elite universities, or arguments on the “civilized” or “rational” violence of the state, than any sophisticated thought experiment I could have constructed to counter the ticking-bomb scenario of these discussions or the hand-wringing around good people having to do bad things and dirty their hands.
Chapter 3, “The Dispersed Body of the Police and Fictions of the Law,” takes the textures of everyday relations in the slums and tracks how the policing functions get dispersed over a range of actors. Similar to Foucault’s insight that the body of the psychiatrist is present in the tokens of his power that are displayed everywhere in the asylum, or in the actions of servants whose work is conceptualized as an extension of the medical gaze, I found that the presence of the police was widely dispersed in different social actors. While some aspects of policing might be understood by following formal police patrols or by seeing what transpires in police stations in, say, the recording of FIRs, for other aspects to come to light a methodological push would be needed to expand the boundaries of the field site by either following
