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

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

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

Actual and potential gifts:Critique, shadow gift relations and the virtual domain of the ungiven

What is given may be evaluated in relation to what might have been given but was not. The central thematic of this essay is what we term the shadow gift relation (as distinct from the more standard anthropological gift relation among exchange partner dyads) between the gift that is given and that which remains ungiven—with the latter, both present and not present, coming to haunt and unsettle the former. The potential of the gift is key for it is intimately related to critique: we explore how the relation between the virtual ungiven and what is actually given may come to form the basis of social criticism. This essay, then, defines a kind of ‘keeping while giving’ that is related to but different from that famously elaborated by Annette Weiner, for what is kept back, in the cases we discuss in this essay, are virtual (imagined) forms of gift. Giving is a technology of the imagination because it is a process that precipitates the imagination of a relation between an actual gift and a double that is virtual but nonetheless real because it exists in the form of a manifold of potentials for how the gift could be. Keywords: Critique; temporality; gift; potential; philanthropy; charity; hauntology; shadow gift relatio

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

Introduction:On Names in South Asia: Iteration, (Im)propriety and Dissimulation

Do names require a context in order to determine who a name refers to or are names the example par excellence for words that do not require a non-linguistic context to be specified? Since Russell’s (1911) classical paper on this theme, proper names have been treated as a test case for theories of reference in philosophical debates. Whereas those in favour of contextualism insist that names are a species of indexicals, the proponents of anti-contextualism squarely place the discussion of prope..