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In this article, I examine the ways in which ideas of martyrdom are employed by Gujjars in Rajasthan to describe their experiences of participating in the 2006 and 2007 Gujjar Andolan (protest), serving in the army, and in their telling of the Devnarayan epic. I take as a starting point the manner in which the bodies of Gujjars killed in police firing during the andolan were laid out for 17 days at the site of the andolan while Gujjar men and women recited the Devnarayan epic. The laying out of the martyred bodies then becomes a site for the production of caste belonging and caste love. © 2022 SAGE Publications.

Sociology

(SoHSS) School of Humanities and Social Sciences

Contributions to Indian Sociology

The theopolitics of protest: Martyrdom in the Gujjar Andolan, the army and the epic

World University root node

The Politics of Custom

An anthropological study on judicial practices in South Asia, this volume takes criminal cases as frameworks to examine power dynamics within a legal setting. Case studies in this book analyse a set of state and non-state institutions and the practices of people associated with them. The essays delve into the underlying tension in institutional contexts between legal practitioners such as police officers, lawyers and judges who orient their claims towards neutralism, objectivity and equality and a set of everyday interactions and decisions where cultural, social and political factors play a major role. This volume is based on the premise that the study of judiciary cases, in all their multifaceted complexity, provides a pertinent and original angle from which to access some issues of South Asia. The chapters examine the discourses and relationships around criminal cases that shape how ideas circulate in the public sphere and how mediation and negotiation between different actors characterize police and court practices.

Regime of Legality: Ethnography of Criminal Cases in South Asia

Based on fieldwork in Udaipur district in Rajasthan, this article examines how Bhil tribal leaders of the Vanvasi Kalyan Parishad (VKP), a branch of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), a Hindu nationalist organisation, profess an ethic of des seva, or work and care for the nation, while describing their work with the VKP. Focusing on the VKP and RSS campaigns to Ayodhya in 1990 and 1992 and to the Shabari Kumbh in 2006, I examine the shifts in the political and ethical repertoires that shape tribal VKP fieldworkers' modalities of action and forms of self-making during travel at these different moments in time. During these campaigns, non-tribal leaders sought to discipline tribal leaders, referring to historically constructed ideas and practices about the civilisational inferiority of tribals, in order to show that they can never properly engage in des seva. The article draws on incidents from these two campaigns in order to show how tribal leaders fashion themselves in relation to how others believe they should behave and reveals some of the ways in which tribals inhabit, resist and revise the ideas and practices of Hindu nationalism.