Surprise, as Usual:Reflections on Five Months of Fieldwork on Personal Names and Renaming in Delhi

This research project, which is supported by an Independent Social Research Foundation Early CareerFellowship with a supplementary grant from the British Academy, analyses the significance of naming andrenaming practices in relation to caste and religion in India. Though frequently stigmatizing, caste namescan be treated inventively: hidden, changed, or subject to revaluation. The project seeks to explorehistorical strategies of naming and renaming whilst also bringing the study squarely into the present: whatcan naming strategies tell us about Indian society in a time of expedited social transition? The aim is tosynthesize and reinterpret existing approaches to the naming of persons in India whilst also developingoriginal ethnographic case-studies focusing on three contested areas: low- and high-caste strategies ofname-changing, Sikh reformist attempts to reinvigorate the religion’s anti-caste sentiments throughparticular kinds of naming practices, and secularist, anti-caste activists’ provision of 'secular names' suchas the given name 'Sanketh' (Information) and surname 'No-caste'

Secularism's names:Commitment to confusion and the pedagogy of the name

This essay takes up social and political questions of naming that are often ignored in studies of inequality or exclusion. What if South Asian personal names ceased to reveal demographic ‘data’ about their bearers, scrambling any attempt at automatic categorization? The focus here is on naming and/or renaming for ideological reasons, and in such ways that the identity of the bearer is deliberately blurred. Grounded in ethnographic work amongst committed proponents of secularism in India (principally rationalist, humanist, and atheist activists), the essay identifies two main strategies that activists use for the production of ‘disidentification’: purification of the caste and religious connotations of names, and multiplication of those connotations in the giving of boundary-crossing names. Common to each is a rationale that seeks to break the association between name and pigeonholed identity. However, acts of renaming, and non-normative names as such, can be and are contested. Thus, in order to clarify what is at stake in the domain of secular naming practices the essay also focuses on debates and criticisms from both within and outside it

Hindutva's Blood

In this article we examine blood as a medium and metaphor for Hindutva’s political transactions. Specifically, we identify three ways in which blood operates in Hindutva thought and practice. First, it serves to create a spatial geographic whole – an original Hindu nation whose inhabitants share the same blood. Second, blood serves to mediate between the violent and non-violent aspects of Hindu nationalism, authorizing and reconciling present acts of violence with a supposed Hindu capacity for heroic restraint. And third, blood serves to establish a temporal continuum between a Hindutva past, present and future, writing Hindu nationalist thought and action backwards into Indian history, and forwards to threaten future bloodshed against non-adherents. In these three ways, Hindutva imaginations and extractions of blood work through each other. In present-day India, these three political manifestations of blood – as a marker of exclusion, as mediating non-violence, and as premonitory threat – have all appeared in the Citizenship Amendment Act controversy and around the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic. As blood overflows through time and space, it threatens to erase difference and legitimize violence while further extending the ideology’s reach

Guru Logics

This commentary highlights the diversity of thematics and conceptual schema generated by guru-ship, and its capacity—as a set of principles as much as specific persons—to participate in, and move between, multiple social and conceptual domains. The aim is to reassess some of the key existing literature on guru-ship while developing a kind of analytical toolkit in order to aid future studies and stimulate new thought on the phenomenon. The guru, we argue, is a social form of peculiar suggestibility. We suggest that the multiplicity and diversity of the guru’s political and economic entanglements point toward a sense of the guru’s uncontainability, a quality which, in a seeming irony, relies at least in part on the guru’s ability to contain diverse others (principally his/her devotees and former incarnations). We present the case study of an avatar guru—a particularly prolific “collector of associations”—who exemplifies the expansive personhood of the guru as an “inclusive singularity.” Emphasising the plural forms of guru-ship, we define categories of anti-guru and collective guru while also drawing attention to the guru’s mimetic proficiency and the complex role of the guru in imagination and fantasy and gender politics. The political and governmental functions of guru-ship are also analysed, with “guru governmentality” not “just another” agency of devolved governance in an era of economic liberalisation but the retooling of the radical asymmetry of the guru-devotee relationship in order to produce “humanitarian” or “developmental” effects, which from devotees’ point of view could hardly be glossed as “secular”

Ungiven:Philanthropy as critique

Drawing on field research principally from contexts of medical blood donation in North India, this article describes how gifts that are given often critique—by obviation—those that remain ungiven: the care not provided by the Indian state for Bhopal survivors, the family members unwilling to donate blood for their transfusion-requiring relative, and so on. In this way, giving can come to look like a form of criticism. The critiques that acts of giving stage are of absences and deficits: we present cases where large paper hearts donated by survivors of the 1984 Bhopal Gas Disaster to the prime minister of India signal his lack of one, where donated human blood critiques others' unwillingness to do so, where acts of blood donation critique and protest communal violence, and where similar acts of giving over simultaneously highlight a deficit in familial affects and an attempt to resuscitate damaged relational forms. We thus illustrate how critique can operate philanthropically by way of partonomic relations between the given and not-given

Hematologies

In this ground-breaking account of the political economy and cultural meaning of blood in contemporary India, Jacob Copeman and Dwaipayan Banerjee examine how the giving and receiving of blood has shaped social and political life. Hematologies traces how the substance congeals political ideologies, biomedical rationalities, and activist practices.Using examples from anti-colonial appeals to blood sacrifice as a political philosophy to contemporary portraits of political leaders drawn with blood, from the use of the substance by Bhopali children as a material of activism to biomedical anxieties and aporias about the excess and lack of donation, Hematologies broaches how political life in India has been shaped through the use of blood and through contestations about blood. As such, the authors offer new entryways into thinking about politics and economy through a "bloodscape of difference": different sovereignties; different proportionalities; and different temporalities. These entryways allow the authors to explore the relation between blood's utopic flows and political clottings as it moves through time and space, conjuring new kinds of social collectivities while reanimating older forms, and always in a reflexive relation to norms that guide its proper flow