Political Patronage and Ritual Competitions at Dussehra Festival in Northern India

In this chapter, I discuss a case which illustrates how the passage from religious festival to cultural programme is the result of a historically complex process involving different actors and mediations at different levels of society. I focus my observations on a royal cult in the Indian Himalayas -- the Kullu Dussehra -- established in the 17th century by a local king. At the beginning of the 1970s, it was nationalised and promoted as a national, then even international, 'folk dance festival'. Like many other examples of heritage production, the case I present here is neither an anonymous nor a spontaneous process. It has been consciously selected and set up by political leaders and local notables, not without causing some tension or even confrontation between other members of local society whose disagreement had different motivations and took up multiple forms. I will retrace the history of this controversial process not only by locating the main actors and the ritual and political stakes which are behind it, but by contextualising this local event within the wider national cultural framework to which it is strictly related. My concern here is on local debates about heritage and tradition, and how they took form in a specific regional context. In order to do so, I draw upon a selection of newspaper cuttings, and on narratives of people who took part in the cultural promotion of the Dussehra festival

The authority of law and the production of truth in India

This article draws on this idea of shared control over trial interactions between witnesses and legal professionals to analyze a criminal case observed at Shimla District Court in Northern India. In this case, the complainant along with other prosecutor witnesses turned hostile during the trial and denied all previous accusations. Unlike the high-profile Italian case mentioned above where witnesses were linguistically equipped to engage in a "war of words" (Gnisci and Pontecorvo 2004:981) with the legal specialist, the case analyzed here is in a setting where the linguistic authority of the legal professionals, who speak English and who have mastered judicial procedures, starkly contrasts with the poor content of the replies given by the witnesses, who do not understand English and are completely unfamiliar with juridical notions.Issue title: Authoritative Speech in the Himalayas. Daniela Berti is a social anthropologist and research fellow at the National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS), Paris, and a member of the Centre for Himalayan Studies (CEH), Villejuif. She is co-editor of The Cultural Entrenchment of Hindutva: Local Mediations and Forms of Resistance (2011) (with N. Jaoul and P. Kanungo), Of Doubt and Proof: Ritual and Legal Practices of Judgment (2015) (with A. Good and G. Tarabout), and Regimes of Legalities: Ethnography of Criminal Cases in South Asia (2015) (with D. Bordia). She has recently started a project on the courts' management of environmental and animal protection

Hindu nationalists and local History: From ideology to local lore

International audienceThis article analyses how the Hindutva ideological programme on history-writing is concretely implemented at grass-root levels by an rss-affiliated organisation. The organisation's name is the Akhil Bharatiya Itihas Sankalan Yojna. The area of fieldwork moves from its rss headquarters to its Chandigarh branch and to its Kullu branch. The primary objective of the article is to shed light on the multiple forms of mediation of the organisation, which show how Hindutva influence in local society cannot be simply reduced to the direct effects of its militants' actions. It also examines how the Hindutva discourse on history infiltrates the local conception of regional culture , merges with pre-existent conceptions and encounters specific forms of resistance. Finally, the article suggests the importance of understanding the Hindutva rereading of Indian history in the light of other post-colonial historiographies, engaged in a similar effort of placing the locality within a wider and prestigious framework. o ver the last few years quite a virulent debate has animated the circle of indian historians who have actively denounced and decon-structed the rewriting of indian history by rss-affiliated organisations.. rss is the abbreviation of rashtriya swayamsevak sangh, "association of national Volunteers ", a militant organisation for the propagation/diffusion of Hindutva ("Hinduness"). The aim of the organisation is to build a new (and strong) Hindu people/nation. its members' training is paramilitary. The rss is the real core of the other organisations that together form the sangh Parivar ("family of the sangh", with reference to the rss), a journalistic expression for the complex network of organisations formed around the rss. among these, one is a political party, the bjp (Bharatiya Janata Party, "Party of the indian People "), and another is a religious organisation, the vhp (Visva Hindu Parishad, "universal Hindu congress")

Courts of Law and Legal Practice

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Gods’ Rights vs Hydroelectric Projects. Environmental conflicts and the Judicialization of Nature in Indiaa

International audienceThe aim of this paper is to show how questions related to the environment and religion may sometimes overlap in Indian judiciary practice. Courts in India are sometimes called upon to make a ruling about writ petitions which involve promoters of public works (hydroelectric projects, dams, tourist resorts, etc.) whom villagers accuse of not only spoiling a natural environment but of damaging a place where a village god allegedly lives. I discuss one example of these writ petitions that I followed up during my fieldwork at Himachal Pradesh High Court in Shimla. The case concerns the building of a water tank near a natural source supposedly inhabited by jogni (powerful feminine beings). Based on ethnographic material and court files, the paper shows how nature is presented in these petitions both in ecological terms, as a resource with an intrinsic value that has to be regulated by law, and in terms of a place over which gods have specific rights. a Generous support for research leading to this article was provided by the programme "Uomo e natura nel pensiero e nella storia sociale dell'India" funded by the Ministero dell'Istruzione dell'Università e della Ricerca, and also the programme "Presence d'Esprits", funded by the French National Research Agency (ANR). b CNRS, Centre d'Études Himalayennes

Ritual kingship, divine bureaucracy and electoral politics in Kullu

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The local enactment of Hindutva Writing stories on local gods in Himachal Pradesh

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The Memory of Gods: From a Secret Autobiography to a Nationalistic Project

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Introduction

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