briefly commenting on my use of the term slum, but first, let me lay out the questions I explore.
First, I in am interested in asking how to understand the temporality of a catastrophic event such as a series of terrorist attacks on a city. In media representations and in one reading of the judicial process, what follows a terrorist attack is a series of linear actions – the event, its investigation, court trial, and fixing of responsibility, followed by sentencing and punishment. This particular idea of the event, as bounded and occurring in a linear succession of actions, often obscures from view the actual bundling of smaller events which cluster together and radiate in different directions, such as identifying suspects, interrogations, production of police documents, witness statements, court hearings, postponements, compromises; I argue that it is in these details that one can find the way something like a terror-related investigation spreads its tentacles into communities from which suspects are picked up, relatives and friends are forced to give testimonies against them, and whole communities are stigmatized and rendered guilty by association. Further, I ask, how are cruel and inhuman punishments, including torture, absorbed into the life of communities? I examine the relation between subjugated knowledges and what I call “inordinate knowledge” to retrieve and take forward the writings of a torture survivor, Abdul Wahid Shaikh, to claim for his incredible writing the status of social theory that undoes the plethora of justifications for torture that have been crafted by learned jurists and professors.
Second, I ask how does the fact that the police as a biopolitical body is dispersed in the neighborhoods that comprise these slums affect the texture of relations as neighbors come to suspect that some among them are police informers, or that policemen posted in the chaukis (outposts), presumably to prevent crime, are, in fact, working with the land mafias or traffickers? In what way may we then think of the relation between the rogue power exercised by the police and the judicial process? How does one study the decentered or dispersed processes though which judicial truth is constituted? Are fictions of the law opposed to its truth or are they truth’s doubles?
Third, how does anthropology channel the expressions that are produced within neighborhoods steeped in the ever-present potential for violence (Motta 2020) without falling into statist definitions of what is terror, or guilt? Above all I want to understand how life is remade, not through any grand gestures of forgiveness and reconciliation, but through an ethics and aesthetics of the everyday. Being able to grasp that the inhuman forms of cruelty I saw or felt, were, after all, not the work of monsters but an eventuality in the career of the human, was an idea I could understand in the abstract. But seeing this connection in the concrete lives of human beings with bodies and names was one of the greatest difficulties of reality I experienced. It marks every word I speak about them and the milieu in which perpetrators of such cruel acts and their victims continue to inhabit the same social spaces. Sometimes one says disparagingly that one could do nothing else but push on. But I came to realize, yet once again, that life can only be knitted together pair by pair (see Cavell 2007b). This book is a further step into these vexed issues.
Let me first introduce some of the features of the slums that have direct implications for understanding what transpires in the next three chapters.
Slum Actions and Definitions
Much of the recent literature on slums sees them as directly connected to the growth of megacities in the Global South. As peripheries to these megacities, the slums are seen as both steeped in crime and squalor and essential for the kinds of services they provide to the residents of more affluent areas. In many ways, these theories build on Simmel’s (1965) understanding of the poor as defined not only by material deprivation but by the kinds of sociality that defines them (see Das and Randeria 2015).
Writing from the perspective of subaltern studies, some theorists have proposed theorizing slums as spaces of habitation, livelihood, self-organization, and politics rather than spaces of material deprivation and political disorder (see V. Rao 2006; Roy 2011; Simone 2004, 2019). Many activists and others working in these areas rightly protest against the picture of urban disorder located within slums and object to the use of the word “slum” for its derogatory implications. In addition to flourishing economic enterprises in these areas, they say, life in slums has evolved its own norms and its own norm-producing mechanisms that are not dependent on the state. For example, they point to informal arrangements such as rights established over what is known as kabza land (occupied land), or the negotiations with employees of electricity companies such as linemen working on the ground to reduce costs of electricity, and so on. Yet, what gets elided in these descriptions is first, the sheer heterogeneity within and among slum populations in terms of access to economic resources; and second, the penetration of state agencies into the everyday life of inhabitants living in these areas.
Consider, the flourishing enterprises in places like Dharavi, regarded as the biggest slum in Asia. These enterprises are evidence of the ability to innovate and the organizational skills of the people residing there. But their prosperity is also built on the fact that owners of these enterprises who live and work in Dharavi are able to extract cheap labor from less fortunate kin or new migrants who use their networks to come to the city and hence start by being dependent on these networks. Over time, these kin or these migrants may be able to make a better life for themselves or not, but the success stories of some are built on the misery of others who might well accept these deprivations in hopes for better futures.
Second, the emphasis on informality overlooks the fact that the success of informal arrangements is also dependent on legal or bureaucratic provisions that were successfully adjudicated in some cases but not in others. Elsewhere, I have analyzed two different court cases and their afterlives in two such neighborhoods in Delhi. In one case residents successfully petitioned the High Court and obtained a stay order against eviction from their shanties. At the same time, the court also ordered surveys of all households to determine who could claim alternate accommodations that it held the government was obliged to provide to eligible residents of the area. It turned out to be impossible for the local-level bureaucrats to complete this task within the stipulated time, which generated more court cases, with the result that people could not be evicted but neither could the promise of alternative housing be realized. (The situation, as people often pointed out to me, was radically different in Dharavi where in many cases builders directly negotiated with slum dwellers to get land vacated by offering them alternate housing.)
In the court case in the second locality, where residents were fighting a powerful educational society who claimed original rights over land they had occupied, cooperation between the local branch of a political party and a nongovernmental organization (NGO) were successful in thwarting the case in court (see Das and Walton 2015). My point is that though the different categories of urban spaces identified by official administrative bodies are a mishmash of different kinds of categories, these official categories have consequences. As Subbaraman et al. (2015) showed, for instance, health outcomes for residents of notified slums in Mumbai are decisively better than the health outcomes for residents of non-notified slums.1 The formal/informal divide does little work here as it completely obliterates from view the hard work slum dwellers do to engage the formal institutions such as courts of law to sustain their lives; nor does this divide work when the apparatus of the state is visible and tangible in every nook and cranny of these slums and settlements. Rather, the task is to see the complex interplay between affordances and constraints; between the fine lattice of formal and informal institutions, and the tensions and alliance among them. Certainly, the residents of these localities can find moments of ecstasy in performing dances or songs with visiting dignitaries, and organize themselves during elections or go to protest marches, and all of these are important forms of political actions. Yet, they can be left with little recourse when embroiled falsely in court cases under terror-related legislation, or tortured in prison, or discover that a child was abducted by a neighbor and trafficked but the police refuse to register even a First Information Report (FIR) to begin investigations.
The searing questions we might ask, then, are questions like, why is torture practiced in a democracy, why does it take weeks to get an FIR registered
