the different places one might find policemen or policewomen within the communities or neighborhoods they are entrusted to police. For instance, even when the local constabulary was supposed to make “rounds” of the neighborhood in Delhi, they rarely went into the narrower meandering streets (galis), confining themselves to visiting the houses of the known political leaders or of middlemen and of women who were already in an awkward relation to normative kinship and who acted as intermediaries. One purpose of this chapter is to show how this dispersed body of the police secretes certain realities that function in one way at the level of low-income neighborhoods, and quite another way when a case is propelled into more formal spaces such as in courts of law. At the level of neighborhoods and slums that are defined as crime-prone, the police use informers, the local dons, and the readily available mafia-like figures as their eyes and ears. These routes through which power flows in the everyday life of the community creates widespread distrust of neighbors or even kin, but the lines of skepticism regarding the trustworthiness of relations in the neighborhood are not given once and for all and are continually realigned in view of new experiences. I describe a case of abduction and rape of a child that does manage to reach the courts by tracking the life of minor documents that are generated from within the community and leave their traces on the documents that are finally produced in court. Taking the theme of legal fictions further, this chapter shows that legal fictions are not simply devices in the hands of judges and lawyers but have different lives in a network of interconnected spaces and times. I find it particularly interesting that these small tools of knowledge (e.g., police memos, police diaries, spot reports) reveal how one part of the functioning of the law can remain opaque to other parts of the juridical process.
Chapter 4, “Detecting the Human: Under Which Skies Do We Theorize?,” asks how do we think of the limits of the human not as a metaphysical issue, but one as it arises within a weave of life? The inhuman as a limit of the human, I argue, lies not in monstrosities produced by nature or in evil inherent in men and women, but in the machines that provide the affordances for the inhuman to become one eventuality of the human.
In his profound reflections on the extreme violence of genocide, Rechtman (2020, 2021) says with devastating simplicity, monstrosity lies not in the person but in the incommensurability that the “evil” of totalitarianism, its stupendous violence, is enabled and served by the hands of completely mediocre men, and I would want to add, not under conditions of totalitarianism alone.
How, then, are we to think of the imperatives to give expression to this experience of inhumanity I found in the slums? The question, as Cavell (1979) has phrased it, is not how society provides correction to its soul as a picture of one’s being within a form of life, of the knitting of the interior and the exterior; it is, rather, how does the soul find ways of correcting its society? It is in response to this question that I look at ethnographic moments, the story written by a child, a mother’s primitive cry as expressing how she experienced her son’s torture, four friends watering the fragile plant of friendship across the Hindu-Muslim divide in a politically fraught environment, as examples of the ways of a soul finding its society. These are also moments that are woven into the becoming of an anthropologist, or into the kind of anthropologist I have become.
The Conclusion should help the voices that have emerged in this text through the intimacy between this writer and the lives and texts she has lived with, to circle back to this very moment in the Introduction as one must return repeatedly to the experience of being in the middle of things, and being within a circle of figures of thought.
Notes
1 1. According to the 2021 Master Plan of Delhi, the unplanned settlements in Delhi can be divided into the following types: resettlement sites, designated slums, urban villages, regularized unauthorized settlements, unauthorized settlements and squatter settlements, also known as JJ (jhuggi jhopdi) colonies. Different kinds of settlements enjoy different degrees of security of tenure – so, for instance, designated slums have rights against eviction under the Delhi Slum Act of 1956; resettlement sites that originated under the government’s own initiative, most notoriously during the beautification-cum-sterilization drive under the National Emergency in 1976 (Tarlo 2003) gave permanent lease to holders over the land allotted to them. Some squatter settlements might have obtained stay orders against eviction from courts but the possibility of their shanties being demolished always looms over their lives. According to different estimates, about 50–70% of the population of Delhi lives in these “unplanned settlements” – thus these populations are not marginal to the life of the city but constitute its very fabric.
2 2. Norbert Elias, the scholar whose work on the civilizing process was extremely influential, had to confront the question of Nazi camps at the heart of European civilization and, hence, what was “civilized barbarism.” See Elias (1996).
3 3. For an incisive critique of how the radicalization discourse has been used in the PREVENT strategy in the UK and has achieved discursive popularity though there is little empirical data to support the thesis, see King and Taylor (2011) and Heath-Kelly (2013). For the connection between histories of torture and histories of democracy, see Rejali (2007), Lazreg (2008), and Thénault (2001). Richard Rechtman (2020, 2021) provides a brilliant analysis of questions that extreme violence generates in academic discourse as symptomatic of the ways in which the stakes of engaging this violence come to be centered around the writer’s status as a moral person rather than the political conditions of possibility of such violence.
4 4. On the relation between the order of telling and the order of occurrence, see Goodman (1980, 1981). On the way events get recast as the police officer renders an oral account of a complaint into a document recognizable to the law, see Satyogi (2019).
5 5. See Das (1977, 1985) for an account of how other Sanskrit texts such as the Puranas acknowledge the rogue or evil aspect hidden in kingship and the role of cleansing rituals during the coronation of the king.
6 6. The three domains making up the pattern are, in descending order of value: sovereignty with its magical and juridical aspects and a sort of maximal expression of the sacred; physical force and valor, whose most salient manifestation is victorious warfare; and fecundity and prosperity, with more complications than I can enumerate here (see Dumézil 1958; see also Hiltebeitel 1974). It is beyond the scope of this discussion, but I point to the fact that Indra commits all three sins of the warrior in the realm of each of the functions (Dubuisson 1986) and each time one of his attributes leaves him for another deity. This is what makes it hard to treat Vedic deities as stable entities and to fully endorse Dumézil’s understanding of the function of gods in Vedic sacrifice that he took from Marcel Mauss.
7 7. Krishna also displays extraordinary compassion at the moment when he saves Draupadi from the humiliation of being made naked in the court of Dhritarashtra after her husband, Yudhishthira, has used her as stake in a bet with Duryodhana that he loses. As Dushasana, one of the Kaurava brothers tries to disrobe her, Krishna magically extends her sari to a never-ending length till Dushasana has to give up. Draupadi then takes the vow to leave her hair loose and wild till she can anoint it with the blood taken from the broken thigh of Dushasana, the same thigh on which he had invited her to sit naked. Draupadi’s affinity to the figure of the avenging Kali becomes evident here.
8 8. I realized how little attention has been paid to the question of sexuality within sovereignty when I read Moore’s learned commentary on Deleuze and Guattari’s interpretation of the “third persona,” the warrior or nomad “who is unable to serve any one (or two) images because s/he is subject to too broad a range of affect or perception: one who bears too much” (Moore 2012: 139). Let us note that the simple alternative suggested here by the use of s/he shows the indifference on the part of Moore to parse out what is it stake in the warrior function being invested in Indra with his rogue sexuality and the difference in thinking of the warrior function through one of the war goddesses on which Dumézil did not gain clarity. If, indeed, Dumézil could be taken to read
