Slum Acts. Veena Das

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 the same cases over a period of time, or by keeping track of 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,