conversations in his field site, Singh wants to capture the dynamism of local deities through new versions of the hero function. It remains unclear, however, whether, unlike the Mitra-Varuna functions which Singh finds in the actual interactions of people with the state functionaries, the Indra version remains at the level of mythology and folklore; or, if there are other regions of life in Shahbad in which resonances to the sins of the warrior are to be found.
Chaganti (2020) is interested in the figure of Indra for a different reason. Working in the courts in Karnataka and following court cases inside the court and in the offices of the lawyers, she wants to capture the rogue element of sovereignty that works both inside and outside the law even as judges and lawyers are engaged in formal hearings as well as in deal making in the corridors of the courts, parliaments, or in smoky cafés. I think Chaganti is right in thinking that a rogue element characterizes the kind of sovereignty Indra embodies. Indra commits, at different times, every sin that Dumézil thinks the warrior is prone to commit and on each occasion one of his powers leaves and goes to some other God. But Chaganti’s ethnography shows that, far from succeeding in taking the warrior god and redeploying him in the service of the good religion, the rogue function gets absorbed within sovereignty.5 In my understanding the rogue element of sovereignty is what suddenly, without warning, upends the pact-making aspects that people might have put together through a tacit understanding of the pairing of force with contract.
All these components of Dumézil’s formulation on the Vedic gods as figures of thought on sovereignty serve very well to complicate sovereignty beyond the notion of the sovereign having the right to declare the exception, but what if we were to take the gaps and puzzles that remain if we were to delve deeper into the relation between the Vedic gods and the resonances with the stories of the Mahabharata on which Dumézil drew famously to formulate his theory of the tripartite division of functions?6 Nicholas Allen (1999) has argued for a functional equivalence between Indra and Arjun (in the Mahabharata) since both stand for the warrior function, but one could very well argue that it is Krishna who is the real agent of the war and is recognized as such by Gandhari, the mother of the Kaurava brothers, when she curses Krishna for having enabled the war to happen in which all her sons perish?7 Second, and from my point of view, an even greater difficulty arises when we consider the goddess figures (particularly war goddesses, or goddesses of fire) in the Indo-Aryan pantheon. Dumézil was inclined to think of the trivalent heroine or the goddess as coming either from the second, warrior function, or from the third function of fertility and prosperity. However, given the difficulties of assigning gender to some Indo-Aryan figures of divinity and the propensity of goddesses to disguise themselves with male names, it would seem that the relation between sovereignty and sexuality needs considerable work if alternate genealogies of sovereignty are to be developed further.8
Finally, in his extraordinary work on temple deities in Jaffna during the period this territory was under the control of the militant LTTE (Tamil Tigers) that waged a war against the State in Sri Lanka (see Spencer 2002), Sidharthan Maunaguru (2020) proposes to think of the vulnerability of sovereignty. Even at the height of its power, he says, the LTTE could not take control over the temples, which retained a measure of autonomy from the LTTE. Maunaguru suggests that one thing which the mythology of gods and goddesses in Hinduism teaches us is that even at the height of their powers, these deities are compelled to share power with other deities, such as folk deities. This formulation should alert us to the fact that, unlike the singular God of Semitic traditions, the deities in the Rigveda appear in groups and are highly volatile. There is, for instance, only one hymn dedicated exclusively to Mitra. Mitra himself might be interpreted as a god who presides over contracts, or alliances, or over the morning light. And in fact, in order to be manifested in the morning so that the darkness of the night might be dispelled, he depends on Agni (fire), the deity who knows the Vedas in their entirety to be ignited, but the Mitra function of pact-making here is not seen as twinned with the Varuna function of force. If notions of sovereignty underlying modern States are to be regarded as secularized theological concepts, then these works encourage us to think of other theologies to provide different pathways to the problem of sovereignty in contemporary contexts.
I leave this as a marker of work to come, but I am convinced that we could tell the story of sovereignty and state by drawing on the potential of these stories just as Singh’s interlocutors do when they redistribute the different mythological elements in new configurations.
Knowledge That Wounds
In the two previous sections I looked at different ways knowledge was inflected with statist interests. Foucault (2003, 2006) famously evoked the figure of the grotesque to describe such disciplinary knowledge in which tokens of power come to stand for disciplinary authority. His corpus of work has been marshalled to suggest contestation, resistance, or struggle, as a counter to such expert knowledge. I do not underestimate the importance of being able to tell “counter-stories” or to make subjugated knowledge appear in the light of critique that is grounded in the experiences that these stories tell (Torre et al. 2001). Yet I want to touch on another register of the darkness of knowledge that is carried, endured, and worked on in the everyday.
In proposing the concept of inordinate knowledge, I readily concede that it remains to be fully developed in the philosophical and anthropological literature; yet, I find that even if some aspects of this concept remain obscure to me, I find it to be powerful in the way it goes beyond the issue of specific speech acts to that of our experience of language as a whole. The concept first emerged in an essay by Stanley Cavell (2007a) which grew into earlier and later versions (in 2007 and 2010) he wrote in conversation with Cora Diamond in response to what she called “the difficulty of reality” and the “difficulty of philosophy” (Diamond 2008, earlier version 2003). In his essay Cavell characterized the sense of woundedness that Diamond gave expression to as “inordinate knowledge,” attaching a string of attributes, not so much to define this concept as to convey its feel.9 For Cavell, inordinate knowledge may be characterized as knowledge that can seem “excessive in its expression, in contrast to mere or bare or pale or intellectualized or uninsistent or inattentive or distracted or filed, archived knowledge, an opposite direction of questionable, here defective, or insipid, or shallow, or indecisive expression” (Cavell 2010: 84). In order to flesh out this concept and to indicate its salience for me, I will dwell in some detail on the conversation between Cavell and Diamond and then give some examples from my ethnography to say what I hope in absorbing this idea into anthropological modes of description or analysis.
In the citation from Cavell I gave, he makes a contrast between two directions – one is the direction of excessive expression that clings to inordinate knowledge and the second is that of insipid, or shallow, expression that he thinks of in relation to archived or pale or bare knowledge. Somewhere in this contrast what seems to matter is the “touch” of words, but the only way to get to that sense of touch is to see what is at stake for Diamond to which Cavell’s essay is a response. Here it might be important to be reminded that, for Cavell, the moments of origin for a thought lie in the provocations among a circle of figures (Cavell 2005: 132); for Cavell, this circle includes Diamond and the ongoing conversations he (Cavell) has with the texts of Wittgenstein. Even if not stated explicitly, somewhere in this conversation is the idea that the touch of words might burn one, in another direction, that one may lose one’s touch with words, become a machine, use any word that could efficiently do the work regardless of whether it was a word alive within a form of life, or a frozen word deadened by meaningless repetition? With these ideas in the background, let us see what is at stake in the question of knowledge for Diamond.
A compelling way of posing the issue of violence for Cora Diamond is the issue of what we do to animals in the era of industrial production of animals as food. She takes the violence to animals as one example around what she calls the “difficulty of reality.” Diamond pairs this expression with another expression, the “difficulty of philosophy” and in pairing these two expressions she wants to point to a region of ethical, even existential, disquiet that cannot be settled by advancing arguments and counterarguments. In fact, she experiences the urge to offer arguments
