Author Description

This is a powerful work by one of anthropology's most distinguished ethnographers. Veena Das weaves together rich fieldwork with a compelling critical analysis to make a significant contribution to contemporary thinking about violence and how it affects everyday life. The book is based on two events—the Partition of India in 1947 and the massacre of Sikhs in 1984 after the assassination of Indira Gandhi. The aim of the book is not to describe the moments of horror. Rather, it talks of what happens to the subjects and their world when the memories of such events unfold in their everyday lives. Two concepts that are knotted together in various ways in the chapters are those of the voice and the everyday. Das shows how the extreme violence of these events has entered 'the recesses of the ordinary'. She also shows how victims of such devastation become voiceless—not in the sense that they do not have words—but that these words become frozen, numb, and without life. Drawing from and engaging with the work of philosophers like Ludwig Wittgenstein, Gilles Deleuze, and Stanley Cavell, the study masters social history and philosophical reasoning. Through anthropological and philosophical reflections, it explores a new way of interpreting violence in societies and cultures around the globe as we strive to understand our world better.