Slum Acts. Veena Das

to the fact that some among us experience some animals as their companions, while others can kill and eat them without blinking an eye? This is a question of being unable to imagine an embodied sense of the extinction of another. Our knowledge of our vulnerability to death is wounding in the light of what we do to animals both in reality and as an allegory of what we do to each other, as humans.

      We might want to be reminded at this point of Diamond’s observation that from some perspectives, the examples she offers would not cause any disquiet. But she feels that the entire response to her woundedness offered as erudite arguments is to deflect the issues and inflict hurt of a different order. As an example, I remember discussing with a colleague how I felt unhinged reading some articles in defense of torture after I had heard an almost primitive cry wrenched out from the mother of a torture survivor, and this colleague responding with “different people are entitled to have different views” said sympathetically, yet not connecting to my sense of what was at stake at all. But the difficulty this raises for philosophy, which is that of the impossibility of thinking itself, is of one order – I want to say that the difficulty of what this means to go on within a community, with kin and with neighbors, who have or are suspected to have engaged in killings and rape might be of a different order. I am aware of all the work on forgiveness and reconciliation but with few exceptions most scholars take this work to be that of the individual subject and not of the way the social is brought to bear on these issues or the work of time (see the remarkable work of Osanloo 2020 in this context, though; see also Das 2021).

Most people in the urban slums I work with are not likely to find themselves in lecture halls but they do express themselves publicly. I have written in an earlier book (Das 2007) about the massive violence against members of the Sikh community in Delhi after the assassination of Mrs. Gandhi by her Sikh bodyguards. I worked with the survivors then for more than a year and faced the complete denial on the part of government officials that deaths of Sikh men had taken place at such massive scale in Delhi and elsewhere. I would like to loop back to a description of one of the streets in which killings had happened and the way women sat in silence in these streets as a gesture through which lamenting and cursing were expressed in the excess of the body.

      More powerful than even the words, though, was the way that the women sat in silence outside their houses refusing to bring mourning to an end … the women were often scared to speak out, but their gestures of mourning that went on and on and on showed the deeply altered meaning of death … the women defiantly hung on to their filth and their pollution. They would not go into the houses, they would not light the cooking hearths, they would not change their clothes … the small heaps of ashes (remains of the fires on which bodies were burnt), the abandoned houses, the blood splattered walls created a funeral landscape, the sight of the women with their unwashed bodies and unbraided hair was a potent sign that mourning and protest were part of the same event. (Das 2007: 195)

These were responses carved out of ritual and mythology and embodied the notion of curses on the perpetrators, but also on a world that had allowed such grievous violence to happen. The whole of language was an accusation. I do not know if this kind of difficulty of reality, in which no one could have deciphered what was going on even as the events of murders unfolded over four days, when you could not know in advance which words might betray and which words might save you, your children, your neighbor – is a difficulty of blockages to thought or blockages to living. The response through drawing on mythology and ritual might not be “thought” in the sense that Diamond wants philosophy to respond, but perhaps at the level of the everyday, it was better than “thought.” Could mythology and ritual then manage to avoid the disappointment with the forms rational arguments take? Or in other words, could one claim that human expressiveness here finds routes to these difficulties of reality?

      It is interesting to me that Diamond does not take up the other registers in Coetzee’s novel – for instance the texture of interactions within the domestic scenes when Mrs. Costello realizes that the grandchildren are eating in the playroom because they are going to have chicken soup, and their grandmother does not like meat on the table while their mother does not want to make any concessions to what she calls with obvious irony, her mother-in-law’s “delicate sensitivities.” In what way would these quotidian interactions change the feeling of abuse that pervades the lecture hall? Mrs. Costello’s disappointments are with the philosophers. At one point in the novel she says “Even Immanuel Kant of whom I would have expected better, has a failure of nerve at this point. Even Kant does not pursue, with regard to animals, the implications of his intuition that reason may be not the being of the universe but on the contrary merely the being of the human brain” (Coetzee 2003: 67).

      What Diamond makes of this impulse in the novel, however, is something more than the fact that philosophers disappoint her. It is thinking itself which fails in the face of these difficulties of reality. But what if we asked, but how do people live with or endure such knowledge?

I have seen evidence that makes me put aside the faith in abstract reasoning or in thought experiments to address this particular range of issues pertaining to the moral responsibilities we have to other humans and to animals; I trust simply that, faced with such inordinate knowledge, people did what they could in the circumstances that they found themselves in. I recall the way in which the pressure generated by policemen to provide false witness against the accused arrested under terror laws was resisted (not always successfully) as families would send homemade food, a hand-knitted scarf, a letter, a picture drawn by a child, across the prison walls made up of brick and mortar, and of the thick lattice of police procedures, knowing full well that the prisoner will be mocked for these, that these gifts would be seized on one pretext or another, but willing the prisoner to know that he is loved. This is the register of words, gestures, and their physiognomy that I have tried to give expression to in this work. As an anthropologist and in fidelity to those in these urban slums I have come to know, I would say that the power of such gestures and of words as gestures is that they do not engage in the kinds of arguments Mrs. Costello was confronted with during the course of her lecture. After all, they have to live in neighborhoods in which your next-door neighbor might be a police informer; or, it may be a kinsman who gave false evidence against your husband or son in a terror trial either out of fear or because of greed; or, a child might say something that would identify a secret you were trying to hide from the police and so words have to be guarded, or perhaps covered up with euphemisms. But in the very ways in which excess of expression and concealment of it are made part of these lives, they testify to the different ways in which people learn to live with inordinate knowledge.

The Next Chapters

      The following chapters are not organized around each of these issues separately – rather the questions I opened the book with run through the book like streams that run into each other throughout. I give here, a brief account of what to expect in the following chapters.

Chapter 2, “The Catastrophic Event: Enduring Inordinate Knowledge,” analyzes the manner in which catastrophic events, namely the Bombay successive blasts in March 1993 and the Bombay train bomb blasts of 2006, unfold within the law, asking what kinds of police practices do these events bring to light? Such practices, I argue, fracture not only individual lives but also the life of the community. At the level of the law, I analyze the vast number of documents produced in the process of terror trials of the 1993 bomb blasts in the TADA¹¹ courts and show that a focus away from the final judgment to the more minor documents such as police affidavits, bail petitions, petitions opposing extension of police custody, as well as confessions elicited from the accused, reveal the fictions of the law. A close reading of these documents yields important insights into the judicial processes through which torture can take place right under the eyes of the judges and within the legal processes itself. Although very few legal scholars would now accept Bentham’s characterization of common law fictions as “wicked falsehoods,” not every type of conceptual construction can be brought under the label of a legal fiction (see Del Mar and Twining 2015). The chapter shows in some detail how specific devices of fiction, such as plot, character, and chronotope, are used to create a story of conspiracy which even if it is not upheld