process of a criminal hearing as lawyers and witnesses are made to recount events in an adversarial setting. In fact, neither objects implicated in a crime, nor subjects remain stable as they move from one place to another, say from a neighborhood in which a fight occurred to the police station or a court of law: nor is the order of recounting an event in everyday life in the slums of the same order as recounting the same event in a court under the pressure of legal definitions of relevance, direct witnessing, hearsay, and cross-examination.4 In other words, the story of a crime and of policing that one elicits through ongoing participation in the life of a slum might remain in the confines of this local milieu or it might move along different networks that draw upon NGOs, politicians, policemen, and become grafted onto other events, ending up in a court of law. However, we cannot simply add up the different components of these stories as if these were pieces of a jigsaw puzzle that will “naturally” fit into a pattern. Instead, we might think of a fragment as it breaks from one context and attaches itself to another one in ways that its earlier location might be made to disappear or the fragment might disturb the harmony of its new location (see Das 2007, 2020).
In a recent paper, Kublitz (2021) offers a fine example of marrying scale to perspective as she tracks the killing by the Danish police force of a petty criminal, called Omar, whose Muslim identity leads the police to remake the narrative of his killing by elevating his actions and attributing them to the actions of a “foreign terrorist.” What is interesting in Kublitz’s analysis is that she shows how simultaneously his life within the local-level gang-related violence is engulfed and made to disappear as the narrative of the foreign terrorist takes hold of public imagination and in the strategic reasoning of security forces. We can see that the more global story of Western countries under threat from Islamic terrorism does not so much contain the history of police actions and inactions at the lower level, as make them irrelevant for the more globally recognizable story and subsequent investment of vast resources in the industry of policing projects to combat radicalization of Muslim youth. As we will see in the next chapter, those who are attentive judges in the courts in India set up to investigate terror-related crimes always consider the possibility that the police are trying to solve the problem of gang-related violence by pushing the case as a terror-related case so as to avoid normal legal procedures.
The picture of parts that fit into coherent wholes is precisely what gives power to statist knowledge because the discordance and disharmony that would result from a mereological form of reasoning is made to disappear by the assumption that the whole by definition includes the parts, and that what is true for the encompassing whole (e.g., the state) must be true for each of its constituent parts (e.g., communities, families), since these parts stand in a nested relation where larger parts contain the smaller ones. As we shall see, this kind of formulation makes the specificity of local events disappear as generalizations are generated to tell “the bigger story.” This formulation invites a consideration of the possibility of alternate genealogies of sovereignty than within the statist ideology we located in the boundaries drawn between civilized and barbaric violence.
Sovereignty: Alternate Genealogies
The distinguished anthropologist and crusader for peace, Alex de Waal, who has studied the political processes of civil war and failure of international peacemaking pacts in Darfur over more than 25 years, argues that when we shift attention from theories of sovereignty that rest on assumptions of the state’s capacity to enforce order, to the domain of real politics, what we encounter is a marketplace of disorderly transactions at every level of the political system (de Waal 2015, 2021). For some other scholars, the conflation of authority and power on the side of the state signals an erosion of the authority of the people and the subsequent rise of populism and its right-wing manifestations (Bargu 2021). A puzzle remains though, for, as Lemaitre (2021) asks, how do we explain the faith people put in the law to put limits on violence, when decades of experience in the postcolony has shown that much violence actually resides within the law? De Waal writes from his experience of participation in peacemaking efforts and his ethnography of negotiations among high officials; Lemaitre writes as a lawyer and now judge in Colombia who has participated in activist projects with displaced women over a number of years. These experiences have given these scholars an acute sense of the contradictions within the law and a deep distrust of very neat theories of sovereignty.
As with these scholars, my own interest in alternate genealogies of sovereignty does not arise so much from abstract theorizing as from trying to make sense of the grains of experience in which these contradictory impulses toward the whole apparatus of the state were visible and tangible in the lives of people in the slums. I turn to Georges Dumézil, the scholar of Indo-European mythology, and his formulations on sovereignty, not because he provides some kind of master key to understand sovereignty but because the mythological register in his work allows different aspects of sovereignty to emerge. I might add in parentheses that a number of my interlocutors would evoke mythological figures, including Rama, Krishna and some minor figures from the Mahabharata or from contemporary renderings of these figures in films, to make a point during a discussion. I don’t dwell much on this strand of my ethnography in the following analysis but it gives me some confidence in making my arguments through the use of mythological figures (see especially Singh 2015).
There is a large and impressive literature pertaining to Dumézil’s notions of sovereignty but, with rare exceptions, it has not been mobilized to think of the character of the modern state – most of the discussion is confined to scholarly circles within Indo-European studies. I am not claiming that it is easy to make Vedic gods speak to contemporary concerns but texts surely have not only a past but also a future if their potential can be marshalled with them and even against them. It is in this spirit that I offer the discussion on the double-headed character of sovereignty, symbolized by the Vedic Gods, Mitra and Varuna – the former standing for the pact-making aspects of sovereignty (pacts include contracts that are both legal and clandestine); and the latter standing for force exercised within the logic of sovereignty. Outside these two poles is the war machine personified in the warrior god Indra, whose functions cannot be absorbed within the double-headed sovereignty and is exterior to the state apparatus.
In their book, A thousand plateaus, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (1987) make an interesting intervention through Dumézil’s text on Mitra-Varuna, drawing attention to the fact that sovereignty includes the despot and the legislator; the fearsome and the regulated; the bond and the pact. But there is something in sovereignty, they say, that exceeds the Mitra-Varuna function, in that the Indra function stands for notions of unlimited cruelty and unlimited compassion, violence and justice, that are imagined outside the apparatus of the state. I don’t stand by every strand of interpretation of the Mitra-Varuna functions in either Dumézil or in Deleuze and Guattari, but that they open certain doors for thinking of sovereignty outside the political theories inherited from Christian theology is not in question for me. I will indicate some of the difficulties when it comes to the specificity of these Vedic gods or their relation to the characters in the Mahabharata on whom Dumézil later tries to map these functions. For now, I am interested in the way these ideas on sovereignty have been absorbed in the work of some anthropologists.
Bhrigupati Singh (2012) takes the figures of Varuna and Mitra and demonstrates how they become productive figures of thought to illuminate his rich ethnography of the State in rural Rajasthan. In addition to showing how the twin figures of Mitra-Varuna function in connection with the people’s encounters with state-level bureaucrats, Singh’s discussion includes a substantive discussion of the demotion of Indra in Indian mythology. There are some beautiful moments in the text, where he shows how traces of mythological stories pertaining to Indra continue to animate conversations on, for instance, the sin Indra committed in seducing the wife of the sage Gautam, or his defeat at the hands of the child Krishna. The problem of the warrior, Singh says, citing Dumézil, is that, “Theologically and possibly socially the most difficult task had to be carried out against the traditional warriors, human and divine; the problem was to redeploy them in the service of the good religion, to preserve their force while depriving them of their autonomy” (cited in Singh 2015: 176). In tracking the various ways mythological elements
