Slum Acts. Veena Das

1 Introduction

Slum Acts is written in these ominous times when the surveillance apparatus of the state in India is being used to curb all dissent, accompanied by a draconian curbing of political liberties and dismantling of the research infrastructure that once allowed the social sciences to flourish in India. Simultaneously, global theories of violence, civil war, terrorism, torture, or policing demonstrate the increasing influence of the security apparatus of the state on academic writing (Whitehead 2012). A global discourse on the threat of international terrorism has allowed reputed scholars to defend the use of torture by the evocation of scenarios of extreme emergency and, while much discussion has focused on the brutality of civil wars waged by non-state actors, the role of states as collaborators of these non-state actors, as financiers of the weapons used in civil wars, or the direct violence perpetrated at a distance by states through drone attacks, carpet bombing, or torture in offshore prisons, is made to disappear. This book takes on the problematic of the violence perpetrated through the security apparatus of the state and its relation to judicial logic applied in both states of emergency as well as in the hurly-burly of everyday urban life. The close relation between policing and urban existence was of much interest to Foucault (2008) but while he was looking at police ordinances and absorption of disbanded solders at the end of war, Slum Acts asks how the imagination of slums as specific sites of urban disorder comes to be connected with the imaginary of transnational terrorism. And though from a distance it might seem that judicial logic in the case of regulation of urban populations might be very different from the judicial logic in the case of terror trials, we find surprising resonances between the two. This is not to say that the specter of terrorist violence does not produce an intensification of cruel practices in the way police investigate terror-related cases but that there is no sharp dividing line between the two.

      I do not start with a set of ready-made concepts which I can simply apply to the questions that animate this book, but perhaps I can say how my questions developed as a result of a long-term ethnography of what I call urban slums here as a short-hand term, but which can include many different categories of spaces defined primarily through their relation to the classifying and regulating mechanisms of urban governance. (For my work on these localities, see especially Das 2011, 2014, 2020; Das & Walton 2015.) I will introduce these areas, briefly commenting on my use of the term slum, but first, let me lay out the questions I explore.

First, I in am interested in asking how to understand the temporality of a catastrophic event such as a series of terrorist attacks on a city. In media representations and in one reading of the judicial process, what follows a terrorist attack is a series of linear actions – the event, its investigation, court trial, and fixing of responsibility, followed by sentencing and punishment. This particular idea of the event, as bounded and occurring in a linear succession of actions, often obscures from view the actual bundling of smaller events which cluster together and radiate in different directions, such as identifying suspects, interrogations, production of police documents, witness statements, court hearings, postponements, compromises; I argue that it is in these details that one can find the way something like a terror-related investigation spreads its tentacles into communities from which suspects are picked up, relatives and friends are forced to give testimonies against them, and whole communities are stigmatized and rendered guilty by association. Further, I ask, how are cruel and inhuman punishments, including torture, absorbed into the life of communities? I examine the relation between subjugated knowledges and what I call “inordinate knowledge” to retrieve and take forward the writings of a torture survivor, Abdul Wahid Shaikh, to claim for his incredible writing the status of social theory that undoes the plethora of justifications for torture that have been crafted by learned jurists and professors.

      Second, I ask how does the fact that the police as a biopolitical body is dispersed in the neighborhoods that comprise these slums affect the texture of relations as neighbors come to suspect that some among them are police informers, or that policemen posted in the chaukis (outposts), presumably to prevent crime, are, in fact, working with the land mafias or traffickers? In what way may we then think of the relation between the rogue power exercised by the police and the judicial process? How does one study the decentered or dispersed processes though which judicial truth is constituted? Are fictions of the law opposed to its truth or are they truth’s doubles?

Third, how does anthropology channel the expressions that are produced within neighborhoods steeped in the ever-present potential for violence (Motta 2020) without falling into statist definitions of what is terror, or guilt? Above all I want to understand how life is remade, not through any grand gestures of forgiveness and reconciliation, but through an ethics and aesthetics of the everyday. Being able to grasp that the inhuman forms of cruelty I saw or felt, were, after all, not the work of monsters but an eventuality in the career of the human, was an idea I could understand in the abstract. But seeing this connection in the concrete lives of human beings with bodies and names was one of the greatest difficulties of reality I experienced. It marks every word I speak about them and the milieu in which perpetrators of such cruel acts and their victims continue to inhabit the same social spaces. Sometimes one says disparagingly that one could do nothing else but push on. But I came to realize, yet once again, that life can only be knitted together pair by pair (see Cavell 2007b). This book is a further step into these vexed issues.

      Let me first introduce some of the features of the slums that have direct implications for understanding what transpires in the next three chapters.

Slum Actions and Definitions

      Much of the recent literature on slums sees them as directly connected to the growth of megacities in the Global South. As peripheries to these megacities, the slums are seen as both steeped in crime and squalor and essential for the kinds of services they provide to the residents of more affluent areas. In many ways, these theories build on Simmel’s (1965) understanding of the poor as defined not only by material deprivation but by the kinds of sociality that defines them (see Das and Randeria 2015).

Writing from the perspective of subaltern studies, some theorists have proposed theorizing slums as spaces of habitation, livelihood, self-organization, and politics rather than spaces of material deprivation and political disorder (see V. Rao 2006; Roy 2011; Simone 2004, 2019). Many activists and others working in these areas rightly protest against the picture of urban disorder located within slums and object to the use of the word “slum” for its derogatory implications. In addition to flourishing economic enterprises in these areas, they say, life in slums has evolved its own norms and its own norm-producing mechanisms that are not dependent on the state. For example, they point to informal arrangements such as rights established over what is known as kabza land (occupied land), or the negotiations with employees of electricity companies such as linemen working on the ground to reduce costs of electricity, and so on. Yet, what gets elided in these descriptions is first, the sheer heterogeneity within