Slum Acts. Veena Das
in which the stakes of engaging this violence come to be centered around the writer’s status as a moral person rather than the political conditions of possibility of such violence.
4 4. On the relation between the order of telling and the order of occurrence, see Goodman (1980, 1981). On the way events get recast as the police officer renders an oral account of a complaint into a document recognizable to the law, see Satyogi (2019).
5 5. See Das (1977, 1985) for an account of how other Sanskrit texts such as the Puranas acknowledge the rogue or evil aspect hidden in kingship and the role of cleansing rituals during the coronation of the king.
6 6. The three domains making up the pattern are, in descending order of value: sovereignty with its magical and juridical aspects and a sort of maximal expression of the sacred; physical force and valor, whose most salient manifestation is victorious warfare; and fecundity and prosperity, with more complications than I can enumerate here (see Dumézil 1958; see also Hiltebeitel 1974). It is beyond the scope of this discussion, but I point to the fact that Indra commits all three sins of the warrior in the realm of each of the functions (Dubuisson 1986) and each time one of his attributes leaves him for another deity. This is what makes it hard to treat Vedic deities as stable entities and to fully endorse Dumézil’s understanding of the function of gods in Vedic sacrifice that he took from Marcel Mauss.
7 7. Krishna also displays extraordinary compassion at the moment when he saves Draupadi from the humiliation of being made naked in the court of Dhritarashtra after her husband, Yudhishthira, has used her as stake in a bet with Duryodhana that he loses. As Dushasana, one of the Kaurava brothers tries to disrobe her, Krishna magically extends her sari to a never-ending length till Dushasana has to give up. Draupadi then takes the vow to leave her hair loose and wild till she can anoint it with the blood taken from the broken thigh of Dushasana, the same thigh on which he had invited her to sit naked. Draupadi’s affinity to the figure of the avenging Kali becomes evident here.
8 8. I realized how little attention has been paid to the question of sexuality within sovereignty when I read Moore’s learned commentary on Deleuze and Guattari’s interpretation of the “third persona,” the warrior or nomad “who is unable to serve any one (or two) images because s/he is subject to too broad a range of affect or perception: one who bears too much” (Moore 2012: 139). Let us note that the simple alternative suggested here by the use of s/he shows the indifference on the part of Moore to parse out what is it stake in the warrior function being invested in Indra with his rogue sexuality and the difference in thinking of the warrior function through one of the war goddesses on which Dumézil did not gain clarity. If, indeed, Dumézil could be taken to read that the power of Indra is ensnared within the two poles of the sovereign, surely a war goddess with all her disguises and ruses could not have been ensnared in the same manner. As if matters were not difficult enough, Maunaguru’s (2020) excellent formulation as to how the LTTE (Tamil Tigers) challenged Sri Lankan political sovereignty, establishing their own laws in the territories it controlled, but could not challenge the sovereignty of the established deities of Tamil temples in the same region, shows the tremendous challenges of understanding the relation between the warrior function and the two-headed sovereignty of Mitra and Varuna. As an aside, one might also consider how new kinds of urban warfare have led to a folding of the warrior into the professional soldier even in modern armies (see Barry 2008).
9 9. “[G]iven that three points define a circle and that we already know that a circle – as well as being the name for a group of people sharing an interest – is for Emerson another figure for an essay, I would say that Emerson is here conceiving the origin of an essay as the conversation of the circle of figures by which it has been inspired” (Cavell 2005, 132).
10 10. Diamond makes it clear in at least two end notes that she is not denying a role to argument but is pointing to the contexts in which argument simply becomes a form of avoidance of the real issues at stake.
11 11. TADA is the abbreviation for the Terrorist and Disruptive Activities (Prevention) Act which was in force between 1985 and 1995.
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