Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015. xiii, 335 pp. (Illustrations, map.) US$27.50, paper. ISBN 978-0-22619-454-7.
Bhrigupati Singh’s ethnography of an impoverished region in Rajasthan is a rich and thought-provoking account of Shahabad, a remote area of disappearing forests in Rajasthan inhabited by former bonded labourers (Sahariyas), among other groups. Shahabad was known for a series of starvation deaths in 2001 to 2003 and Singh went there to understand life amidst deprivation and scarcity. But the account that he renders seeks to show the possibilities for abundant life even within such a bleak context, challenging standard definitions of poverty put forward by economists.
In a time where research is dominated by what Singh terms “new” India books, it is important to have accounts from rural India. I read the book as an interesting combination of the new and old, perhaps reflecting the current state of anthropology as a discipline. One the one hand, the book is structured like the older tradition of “village studies” in its holistic emphasis on the interrelation of very different domains, or “thresholds of life” as he puts it (“this book is a rhizome, growing in different directions” (3). The book moves from historical context—and a real strength of the book is a consistent historicizing of the domains studied—to spirit possession, from development efforts to asceticism, from dietary change, fashion, and erotic intimacies (affairs) to local deities, and the question of poverty.
While ethnographically structured in the mode of village studies, much of the book is focused on engaging current theoretical concerns such as sovereignty, ethics, and the religious-secular divide. Its pervasive use of the first person and literary-philosophical writing style, drawing especially from Deleuze and Nietzsche, will be a point of diverging tastes among readers. The book is populated with concepts such as “political theologies,” “thresholds of life,” “intensities,” “potencies/potential” and a Nietzschian/Deleuzian conception of “life” (282–293). While written in an undeniably compelling and skillful manner, the frequent movement from the specific to the abstract and self-reflection—most pronounced in a conclusion written as a question and answer between himself and a Yaksa spirit (whose appearance in a dream apparently initiated the study)—will captivate and alienate readers respectively. One the one hand, the book makes the most consistent and comprehensive use of Deleuze in any ethnographic analysis I have read. But many readers may find this philosophical self-reflection unsettling, especially given the context of starvation deaths, hunger, and history (as well as apparently current practices) of bonded labour.
There is also a danger that such wide-ranging topics of study could gloss over important dynamics even if it does succeed in conveying a wider sense of the ways in which people conceptualize the quality of life. And Singh’s use of highly abstract concepts, while allowing new perspectives to emerge and not over-determining analysis, does risk concealing these dynamics. For example, in a fascinating account of the festival of Holi, an altercation started by alleged sexual harassment of Sahariya women by a government officer who was in the village to visit his lover, a village ration-shop dealer (ration-shops are tasked with providing highly subsidized food grains to poor households to prevent hunger), spirals into a near riot, police brutality, a protest movement, and court struggle. Singh describes this as reflecting a “circulation of agonistic intensities” (162). But especially given the context of hunger and what appears to be a dealer-bureaucrat-police nexus, it seems to me that this incident demands greater scrutiny. At the very least, this case suggests that the dynamics of the state and “sovereignty” are more complex than Singh’s concept of “Mitra-Varuna,” a paring drawn from Hindu mythology indicating the state’s dual nature of welfare and force (although such a distinction could be as easily taken from Machiavelli or even Gramsci). If as complex and multi-layered a “political theology” as that provided in the study of local deities were applied to this case, I suspect sovereignty would look rather different. Singh wants to move beyond the “dominance-resistance” dichotomy and his concept of “agonistic intimacy” does provide subtlety and complexity to overly simplistic activist accounts (although these conceptions are also part of the field). But although Singh lives at the offices of Sankalp, an activist NGO, and devotes an entire chapter to Kalli, an activist, the struggles and contestations that are taking place and appear to be a driving force of change in the region do not really figure into Singh’s conception of sovereignty and “agonistic intimacy.”
The end of the book contains what I found to be the most compelling chapters. These centre on in-depth and fascinating accounts of the lives of two exceptional people, Kalli, a Sahariya woman activist and Bansi, a con man/holy man. Singh portrays the lives of these individuals, and Bansi in particular, as embodying plentitude amidst scarcity. It is through Kalli and Bansi’s lives that Singh attempts to demonstrate his central argument, that there are diverse ways of living a “good life” that are ignored by mainstream development thinking. And with so much ground covered, both conceptually and in terms of topics studied, this book does succeed in compelling us to rethink how the quality of life is understood.
Jeffrey Witsoe
Union College, Schenectady, USA
pp. 618-619