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Multidisciplinary Academic Journal

12 | 2015 On in South Asia: Iteration, (Im)propriety and Dissimulation

Jacob Copeman and Veena Das (dir.)

Electronic version URL: http://journals.openedition.org/samaj/3985 DOI: 10.4000/samaj.3985 ISSN: 1960-6060

Publisher Association pour la recherche sur l'Asie du Sud (ARAS)

Electronic reference Jacob Copeman and Veena Das (dir.), South Asia Multidisciplinary Academic Journal, 12 | 2015, « On Names in South Asia: Iteration, (Im)propriety and Dissimulation » [Online], Online since 30 October 2015, connection on 03 February 2020. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/samaj/3985 ; DOI: 10.4000/samaj.3985

This text was automatically generated on 3 February 2020.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. 1

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction. On Names in South Asia: Iteration, (Im)propriety and Dissimulation Veena Das and Jacob Copeman

Remaining Nameless: Names, Hiding, and Dislocation Among ’s Runaways Jonah Steinberg

To Be Some Other : The Naming Games that Hijras Play Vaibhav Saria

Naming the , Naming the City: and Ayodhya Deepak Mehta

Secularism’s Names: Commitment to Confusion and the Pedagogy of the Name Jacob Copeman

Kristapurāṇa: Translating the Name of in Early Modern Goa Alexander Henn

On the Im/Propriety of Brand Names William Mazzarella

Signboards and the Naming of Small Businesses: Personhood and Dissimulation in a Sri Lankan Market Town Luke Alexander Heslop

Badnam Science? The Spectre of the ‘Bad’ Name and the Politics of Stem Cell Science in Aditya Bharadwaj

Names and the Critique of History in Urdu Literature:From Manto’s ‘Yazid’ to Zaigham’s ‘Shakuntala’ Gregory Maxwell Bruce

Naming Beyond Pointing: Singularity, Relatedness and the Foreshadowing of Veena Das

Reflections on a Shared Name: Taboo and Destiny in Mayong (Assam) Sean Dowdy

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Introduction. On Names in South Asia: Iteration, (Im)propriety and Dissimulation

Veena Das and Jacob Copeman

1 Do names require a context in to determine who a name refers to or are names the example par excellence for words that do not require a non-linguistic context to be specified? Since Russell’s (1911) classical paper on this theme, proper names have been treated as a test case for theories of reference in philosophical debates. Whereas those in favour of contextualism insist that names are a species of indexicals, the proponents of anti-contextualism squarely place the discussion of proper names within a definite description paradigm, applying Russell’s original argument (with some important modifications) that names are essentially forms of concealed descriptions whose main function is to identify the bearer of that name. Of course, there is always the possibility that the description leads us to conclude that the bearer of the name does not exist, a point that has profound implications for the ghostly existence a name can take at the death of its bearer. Since a proper name is not explicitly a description, though, it becomes clear that we are asked to look below the surface to see what kind of background descriptions must be present for proper names to function. Whether we think of names as directly-referring rigid designators (Kripke 1980), indexicals (Recanati 1997) or definite descriptions (Frege 1953, Russell 1911, Searle 1958), all these theories of naming privilege the one who is taking the name—e.g. if a number of people say that Nikhil was the character in a Tagore story they are assuming background descriptions that include some such facts as: Tagore lived in , he was a writer, and he wrote a novel called Ghore Baire in which Nikhil was the zamindar. Not everyone who has some background information about Tagore or

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Nikhil will have all the relevant information, but there will be considerable overlap between those who use the names Tagore and Nikhil, say, in a conversation on literature—enough agreement for one to conclude that the names refer to an author and a character. The discussion can get more complicated if we ask if the bearer will remain the same in all possible worlds as the idea of names as rigid designators suggests (Kripke 1980), but the focus remains on identification of the bearer.

2 Discussions that take reference to be the primary issue in naming elide certain important questions. The papers in this special issue draw from both ethnographies of names and naming practices in South Asia and theories of names embedded in literary texts, rules of grammar, or in aesthetics to open up other aspects of names. For instance, do names carry existential meanings for those who give or receive them? In what way do social conventions of naming or prohibitions and taboos on names make name-words into containers of emotion? While names function as social designators of say, religion, caste, gender, race, do they also embody the experience of being this kind of person in this kind of social milieu? Instead of drawing sharp boundaries between theory and ethnography, or between discussions in Western philosophy and Indian texts, the papers demonstrate how concepts emerge in the intersection of these formations and provide us a way of thinking of names that provides a lens with which to understand important processes of self-making and everyday violence in South Asia. At the same time, the papers raise questions that contribute to ongoing debates about names and broader processes of signification. 3 One important way we could think of the challenge to the centrality of reference in naming comes from the insightful observations of Peirce. The essential point, if we ignore Peirce’s obsession with generating typologies of signs and naming each type and subtype, is contained in the following observations on proper names: A proper name, when one meets it for the first time, is existentially connected with some precept or other equivalent individual knowledge of the individual it names. It is then, and then only, a genuine Index. The next time one meets with it, one regards it as an Icon of that Index. The habitual acquaintance with it having been acquired, it becomes a Symbol whose Intepretant represents it as an Icon of an Index of the individual named (Peirce 1903: 329, as cited in Weber 2008: 354). There are two important observations to be noted here. First, in the case of the descriptive theory of names, the crucial moment is when the speaker of a name is asked —who is Nikhil? Or who is Alexander?—and, she responds with a description. For Peirce, however, this moment is but one moment—names, he said, course through life and at some junctures they act as indexes while at others as icons of the index. Said otherwise, one learns to apply a name to a person as a matter of habit—names are objects of acquaintance; they are not propositional knowledge. Thus, as one becomes habituated to speak a particular name for a particular person, there is a shift in the quality of the experience of naming. The temporal unfolding of different contexts through which one’s life moves will also bring to the fore many new ways of experiencing one’s own life. Think of Romeo—‘My name, dear saint, is hateful to myself, Because it is an enemy to thee.’ This aspect of Romeo’s own name—that it would become an obstacle to his own self—would not have been offered in any background description given to provide reference. 4 Kripke had already noted in his theory of names as rigid designators that because there is no single correct description of a person, none of the descriptions a person associates with a name might uniquely pick up the object or person whose name it is. Peirce,

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however, was arguing something different—namely, that the semantic and pragmatic aspects of names could not be separated. Finally, we draw attention to the darker aspects of the name brought out in the poignant writing of Derrida (1995) on what he called the (im)propriety of the proper name: ‘What is a proper name—anyway? A name is never proper…’ Resonating with Derrida’s overall take on our being in language as what makes us vulnerable because of its iterability, in the specific case of names too, he is able to draw out what is difficult to name in the name, what is the surplus, what dark potentials lie in our using the name as a vocative—to call another or to be called by another. These matters touch on registers of the name which bring it into the vicinity of ancient magic, the vulnerability of the self, and the fragility of things on the one hand and aspirational politics, defiant self-making, as well as the conjoined joys and burdens of belonging to the social, on the other. We shall see in subsequent sections how the papers in this volume speak to all of these registers of names—as definitive descriptions, as temporal entities, as affect-saturated words with a physiognomy, and as participating in and dangerously becoming imbued with what becomes the occult in our social and economic life. It is important to underscore here that the authors of these papers are not taking concepts from the discussion of names in say, Wittgenstein, Kripke, Peirce, or Derrida, and then applying them to their ethnographies. Rather, they are joining this conversation through both ethnography and the texts that they evoke, placing reflections on names wherever they appear in the weave of life as providing the scaffolding for anthropology’s theory.1 Let us turn then, first, to the theme of anthropology—viz. what relation does the singularity of the individual bear to the sociality in which relations are always, already embedded?

Sociality and singularity

5 In a decisive intervention on names, Lévi-Strauss argued that names are instances of social classifications that move between a horizon of individuation, on the one hand, and more general categories of the social, on the other—i.e. between proper names and common names. In totemic societies, for instance, names of individuals are all taken from some part of the larger totemic complex. Given Lévi-Strauss’s concept of the social as essentially a form of social classification, and the idea of explanation as disclosing an arrangement (see Benoist 2008, Das et al. 2014), it is not surprising that he saw individual names as pointing to a unity (of the totemic complex) divined and claimed in advance (Lévi-Strauss 1966: 174–75). At the same time he also realised that an individual name might mark an event at the time of the individual’s birth or it might mark a specific characteristic of the individual—such as a deformity or a position in relation to a sibling. Thus names, for Lévi-Strauss, cluster around two poles—one in which their relation to the collective is proclaimed and another in which names reflect individual creativity. In between these two poles Lévi-Strauss noted several indeterminate cases that accounted for varying practices with regard to names given to humans, animals, things in nature, or to social artefacts.

6 Although Lévi-Strauss’s formulations on naming continue to provide an important framework for thinking of names as a lens with which to view the relation between the individual and the collective, his evaluation of totemism as a more robust way of conceptualizing the social as compared to (which he tended to associate with individual desire) led him to neglect what might have been a very interesting

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provocation for his theories—viz., the evidence from South Asia on names given, for instance, to sacrificial priests, or to in devotional practices (see Das 1983; Malamoud 1998). Indeed, we (the editors) reiterate that there is a rich field open for exploration in which material on naming practices in South Asia could be made to directly join the conversation in social theory and philosophy. On the one hand we can draw on this conversation in a way that (we hope) allows us to see classic themes in the study of South Asia anew. On the other, the spirit of this special issue is dialogic—it offers something back to what it draws from: theoretical formulations on names in philosophy and social theory

Names as definitive descriptions

7 Commenting on the tightness of connections between names and the social identity they signalled, the narrator in one of Amitav Ghosh’s novels, Sea of Poppies, reflects: ‘The provenance and origins of strangers often provoked Neel’s curiosity: in Bengal it was so easy to know who was who; more often than not, just to hear someone’s name would reveal their religion, their caste, their village. Foreigners were, by comparison, so opaque: it was impossible not to speculate about them’ (Ghosh 2008: 101).

8 At one level, then, it seems that it is in the nature of names that they are tightly connected to the bearer (although the background descriptions are less about the personal attributes and more about the social position—the divined unity of the whole as Lévi-Strauss contended). Yet scholars of South Asia have made this issue more complex by their attention to historical processes through which names came to be fixed. In his work on marriage and rank in Bengal, Inden (1976) points out two interrelated conceptions—one is of gotra names for members of the (and other higher) castes which were the original names of the Brahmin priest-preceptor, primarily used for ritual purposes and for determining caste exogamy. These words, like other words in the , says Inden, were considered to be subtle and powerful substances necessary for the correct performance of Vedic worship. In an uncanny way, one can see the power of the gotra name resurfacing now in the spate of executions of couples ordered by khap Panchayats in Haryana because they married each other despite sharing the same gotra name (Kapila forthcoming). Though such kin related killings are often assimilated within the category of ‘honour killing,’ in these cases what was at stake for the Panchayats was the suggestion of incest—thus sameness of name came to signal sameness of substance in the context of ritual and kinship. 9 The second, interesting point contained in Inden’s description, though, takes us not to the non-arbitrary relation between name and social group but the contingency surrounding a name which can alter the trajectory of the person’s fate (1976: 55–56). One of the incidents recounted in a medieval text (1032 AD) occurs at a point when genealogies are being fixed in the king’s court. For Inden, the main point of the story is to show how Shudra kings in this period used their power to settle the disorder and incoherence that had developed by fixing the ranks among and within castes, and prescribing rules of marriage that preserved the boundaries of these groups. The story goes as follows: the Shudra King Adisura invited five learned from outside his kingdom to compensate for the lack of learned Brahmins of good conduct within the kingdom. Each Brahmin arrived with a devoted Shudra and the king was trying to determine which name belonged to which person. In the process, the name of the last

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Shudra in the team was given as Dasratha Guha. On hearing this name, people burst out laughing. Inden explains in a footnote that the word guha is similar to guhya meaning anus—which is what caused the mirth. To cut the story short, having been consequently demoted in rank this person decided to leave the kingdom and settle elsewhere. The moral of the story, if one can render it as such, is that the official story of the matching of name and good conduct holds in the first four names of the series but in the fifth case, the pattern is broken as laughter bursts out, and thus for the moment loosens the tight order that the king is trying to construct. 10 An important insight on names we get from this text is that the power to name and to fix identity is something the king or the state tries to do—one might say that the right to name might even define power. Consider the various laws pertaining to the right to name your child in European countries. In Germany, for instance, one must be able to tell the gender of the person from the first name. Further you cannot use a last name, or the name of a product or object as a first name. All names given to babies must be approved by the office of vital statistics, the Standesamt, in the area in which the child was born. 11 The ‘becoming legal’ (Deseriis 2015: 23) of the proper name is of course central to the story of the modern state in South Asia. The institutionalisation and fixing of the by colonial governments (Scott et al. 2002) saw the name enter ‘a whole network of apparatuses (demographic records, criminal records, tax records, voting records, immunisation and health records) through which the state can both identify an individual and deploy a series of calculations and operations whose domain and target is the population’ (Deseriis 2015: 23). Specifically in India, the colonial complaint was that personal names were too recurrent2 (and contributed to the native propensity for impersonation), while place names, too, required standardisation (Singha 2000: 6). Moreover, bureaucrats lamented, ‘ in the indigenous scripts, Persian or Devnagri, [were too] difficult to decipher for verification’ (Singha 2000: 60). 12 Corresponding to the state’s interest in enumerating and identifying each individual or group entity and in developing the necessary bureaucratic apparatus to enable this, subjects too try to use the apparatus for their own strategic interests. Thus, for instance, the attempts to standardise and record caste names in the census in the colonial period (see, for example, Nesfield 1885) led to a tremendous volatility as different castes jostled to take on names that were reflective of a higher caste status (Srinivas 1957, Jayswal 2001). Competition for the state resources earmarked for the scheduled castes, scheduled tribes and other backward castes, has now led to agitations for changing caste names in the other direction. The point is that in both cases the groups and individuals do not simply submit to official initiatives in a passive manner but use these new opportunities to strive for new identities in the eyes of the state. 13 We do not mean to underplay the repressive practices of the state or of religious authorities. For instance, the Portuguese inquisition established in Goa in the 16th century strictly prohibited many Hindu practices including the taking of Hindu names (Robinson 2000, Henn 2014). Similarly, identifying individuals considered prone to crime and expelling them from British territory was an important part of policing in colonial India (Singha 1998). Yet fears of forgery, misidentification, and corruption haunted these governmental efforts. Thus the name might be seen as signalling both the possibility of surveillance by the state and strict regulation of who can take which names as well as opening up a space for aspirations to be recognised by the state and

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the manipulation of names to trick the state through duplication of documents, forgery and endless possibilities of petty corruption. 14 The form of manipulation of names we find in Steinberg’s paper on street children in Delhi is that of their profusion (the child having many names) and situational contingency (different names come into play in different situations). Having left their natal places, street children in Delhi take on a number of different names in order to elude an official identity assigned by origins. The names they bear are improper names in Deseriis’s (2015: 3) sense in being ‘explicitly constructed to obfuscate both the identity and number of [their] referents.’ In consequence they disrupt their own ability to act as a technology of government and categorisation; and indeed, for these children, their value lies precisely in this fact. However, where in the cases discussed by Deseriis many people use a single name to create a ‘shielding effect,’3 in those analysed by Steinberg a single child may use many different names in order to continue to elude their and authorities; which is to say that, here, the shielding effect of the name comes from having many of them. 15 Why do these children run away? For , at least, children in rural villages tend to decide to leave home due to distressing domestic circumstances rather than acute poverty, a finding that is in line with Conticini and Hulme’s (2007: 207) observation from that ‘the breakdown of social relationships within the household, and not economic poverty, is the main cause of child migration to the street.’ Having left, children tend to not want to go back, and are intensely aware that this is exactly what state authorities and charitable NGOs have in mind for them if apprehended. Emphasising the situational engaged in by these children in order to evade being tracked and documented, Steinberg also shows how the names they bear cross community boundaries (e.g. Akhil-Azeez) and allude to their bodily form (Petu references a scar on the child’s stomach [pet]; Kalu the darkness [kalima] of the child’s skin). In situations of fluid and contingent biography, argues Steinberg, the body emerges as ‘the sole available durable slate on which to fashion and display self.’ 16 The papers by Vaibhav Saria and Deepak Mehta in this volume explicitly discuss how the law might act to restrict the names one can take in order to achieve semiotic stability, as well as ways in which this power to create a stable identity of the jural person through a control over names might slip from the hands of the law. Saria’s paper on the name-changing practices of the hijras in Orissa shows how the changes from male names to female names and then from one female name to another are embedded in events that might mark both the birth into a new identity and a new set of relations, as well as the death of relations that have become brittle through the instability of desires. Saria interprets the play with names as expressive of a make- believe reality in which the wish is that taking a new name might enable one to erase the past signalled by the earlier name and to begin life anew. This subjunctive mode of living, however, meets its limits precisely in the law when a hijra gets caught in crimes that could be petty (e.g. begging in trains) or grievous (such as ). While in the case of petty crimes it becomes possible for hijras to negotiate with lower level officials through bribery or through links of locality, in the case of crimes of greater enormity, the play with names comes to an end as the courts invariably settle for the hijra’s male name as indicative of the true and authentic name—treating all other names (including their female ones) as criminal aliases. Saria’s interpretation of this complex terrain provides a fascinating glimpse of the judicial unconscious with regard to masculinity

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and sexuality and the hinges in judicial reasoning. The courts are able to short-circuit the need to provide connections between evidence and conclusion by the device of the male name that then becomes a condensed metaphor for the male disposition toward violence. Interestingly, Saria shows that in cases in which hijras are presented as victims of violence (rather than perpetrators) the courts continue to use their female names. 17 The question thus becomes: true and authentic name for whom? We see a similar maladroit insistence on the first- as the true name in Facebook’s decision to deactivate the accounts of drag queens: A Facebook spokesman said the company requires people to use their real name to promote accountability, but drag queen Sister Roma says that is her real name. ‘If you ask anybody who I am in and out of drag, my name is Roma. So currently my profile says Michael Williams next to this gorgeous picture of me, and it doesn’t make sense,’ she said. ‘People don’t look for Michael Williams, and it’s not who I am.’ San Francisco Supervisor David Campos […] said fake names can protect people who are transgender, bullied, or escaping domestic abuse.4 Contestation concerning the power to name a name as true or proper has deep roots in the subcontinent, with personal names frequently thrown up as special status indicators of fallen authenticity. Rupa Viswanath (2013: 133), for instance, cites the poem ‘Ramaswamy becomes Ramsay’ which was published in a south Indian nationalist newspaper in 1923 that ridicules the pariah Christian convert: ‘He therefore [...] donned a collar and tie, / Then added a waistcoat and a watch with trousers by and by... / Then came a pair of socks inside his shoes... / The chrysalis burst, the butterfly / Ignored his parcherry set / And now, ‘one Mr. Ramsay’ dwells/ A swell—in Padripet.’ The tone of V.S. Naipaul’s famous essay ‘Jamshed into Jimmy’ (2002) is not dissimilar to the poem’s and finds its present-day analogue in the proliferation of literature on South Asian call centres and ‘locational masking’, which eschews the possibility of, for instance, an analytic of performance in construing the ‘western’ names taken on by employees as condensed metaphors of the counterfeit modernity of ‘new India.’ What we might point towards here is that such accusations of compromised authenticity in fact possess the characteristics of insults, where we understand the insult to be ‘an act of violence […] [that] denies its very name to its victim by imposing another one [here the so-called true or authentic name] upon him/her. This process is enjoyable yet it can break an individual, even destroy him’ (Bouchet cited in Blom & Jaoul 2008). 18 The becoming legal of the proper name that we have been discussing is not, of course, restricted to personal names. No absolute distinction between personal and place names exists so far as persons and places may be named after one another. Scott (1998: 66–67) notes that geographical location formed a key plank of the local logics that were present in the establishment of (e.g. in England, the surnames Hill and Edgewood). For Sikhs wishing to adhere to the orthodox proscription on the use of caste surnames, but who nevertheless seek stronger differentiation than that provided by the Singh and Kaur,5 use of place names as surnames can provide a handy workaround (an example is that of the current Chief Minister of Punjab, Parkash Singh Badal—Badal being the name of his native village). In other parts of India as well (e.g. western India), use of place names as surnames is utterly conventional.

19 Recent scholarship on the region has focused on state-sanctioned or initiated renaming of places and structures. For instance, it has been argued that the state performs its sovereignty through official acts of (re)naming of structures and places that come to

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authorise and legitimate particular political identities (Hansen 2001). Somewhat like the way in which the Indian state offers recognition to communities of their wounding at the hands of specific cultural productions (books, films) through acts of censorship as sovereign gifts (Cohen 2010), we may suggest that state authorisation of name changes according to the wishes of communities who can be thought of as wronged or deprived sometimes takes the form of a kind of sovereign gift of the name (e.g. the well- known case of the 1970s Dalit namantar movement, ultimately successful, to rename Marathwada University in Aurangabad after Ambedkar).6 20 Geographer Maoz Azaryahu (2011) uses the terms ‘toponymic cleansing’ and ‘symbolic retribution’ to describe the often systematic renaming of streets and places that can take place after regime changes. Azaryahu refers, for instance, to the changing of street names connected with South Africa’s apartheid past shortly after the African National Congress came to power. The cover image of this special issue depicts the physical renaming of Delhi’s Aurangzeb Road, which one night in August 2015 became A.P.J Abdul Kalam Road. However, the year before the official renaming, the Delhi Sikh Gurdwara Management Committee (DSGMC) had petitioned Prime Minister Modi to rename the road after the ninth Sikh guru, Guru Tegh Bahadur—a historical figure who, in 1664, was executed on the orders of Emperor Aurangzeb.7 If this was an attempt to enact symbolic retribution, there is also an echo of the type of forgetting that Connerton (2008: 60) has called ‘repressive erasure’: the condemnation of memory (damnatio memoriae) […] was inscribed in Roman criminal and constitutional law as a punishment applied to rulers and other powerful persons who at their death or after a revolution were declared to be ‘enemies of the state’: images of them were destroyed, statues of them were razed to the ground, and their names were removed from inscriptions, with the explicit purpose of casting all memory of them into oblivion. We might add, though, that whatever the intention of state and other actors in seeking new names for things, complete erasure of the replaced name is never a foregone conclusion. Instead of expunging the name, what may occur is its spectral doubling. The state’s power to (re)name can thus come to stand in ironic relation to its concern to fix the reference. 21 A different, more nuanced and complex perspective on is provided by Deepak Mehta in his paper in this volume on the long legal dispute (1889–2010) over the right of Muslims and to offer worship in the Babri mosque and a virtual Rama temple in Ayodhya. The controversy this dispute generated centred around the question of whether Ayodhya was the birthplace of Rama and whether a temple was demolished by the Muslim invader king, Babar, in the 16th century to build a mosque on that site. The legal controversy raised a host of important issues and Mehta has been diligently ploughing through the more than 1000 pages of the legal archive to build a careful and detailed history of the dispute (see Mehta 2015). His paper here examines specifically the mirroring and the eclipsing of the names of Rama and the name of the Babri mosque.8 Through tracking changes in attached to the name of Rama in the various versions of Ayodhya Mahātmya (the Glories of Ayodhya) that are written in the genre of Sthala Puranas and the mahātmya literature,9 as well as the legal petitions, judgements, and stay orders that are available in the judicial record, Mehta gives us three important insights. First, he shows how the epithets attached to the name Rama change over time so that as the deity acquires jural personality it is transformed from a kingly deity to a legal minor (as the name Ram Lalla, little Rama, implies). Second, the

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specific proper name given to the mosque (Babri) slowly disappears and is replaced by the legal term, ‘the disputed structure’, as if continuing to refer to it by a proper name would give it a substantial presence. The demolition of the Babri mosque by a crowd composed of Hindu kar sevaks on December 6, 1992, makes the place itself a spectral entity, and the disappearance of its name in the judicial record mirrors this spectral quality of the mosque as it moves from being a physical structure to a kind of wound in the landscape. Mehta argues that in a related move, the attempt to give a jural personality to the deity by which its name is made to stand for its rights—as if the deity were a person—becomes the reverse image, so to say, of the disappearance of the proper name of Babri from the (now) demolished mosque. Finally, he also shows how the mutual conjoining of the name of Ayodhya and the name of Rama in the mahātmya literature becomes a formative influence in the deliberations of the court, which also ultimately leads to the disappearance of the name of Babri since no such intimacy can be evoked between the name Babar and the name Ayodhya. The papers by Saria and Mehta show the complex terrain of legal reasoning in which names come to play a significant role, but one that could be obscured because it is never explicitly taken into account.

Name changing as border crossing

22 On February 26,, 2012, the Times of India, a prominent daily, carried a headline, ‘Now, Women Can Retain their Maiden Name.’ The news item pertained to an amendment of a crucial rule under the Court Law by the Bombay High Court, by which (contrary to an earlier rule) a wife who had not changed her name after marriage by publishing it in the official gazette would be allowed to continue to use her maiden name. The court ruled that a woman could not be forced by a court to write her name in the form of her first name followed by her husband’s first name and his surname while making a marriage-related petition. The amendment came about because of a struggle launched by the prominent feminist lawyer, Flavia Agnes, and the NGO Majlis, which works for women’s rights. It reflects on the understanding of names and judicial conventions on names as a significant feature of the struggle for women’s rights in India.10

23 As we saw in the last section, the law has an interest in the regulation of names and thus views changes in names with some suspicion. Yet as Mehta and Saria both show, appearances and disappearances of certain names over others (e.g. male names replace female names in the case of the hijras, and the name Babri disappears to give place to an unnamed ‘disputed structure’ in the case of the Ramjanmabhumi-Babri masjid dispute) are steeped in ideologies of gender and sectarian politics. How would looking at conscious strategies of name changing illuminate a different dimension of names— viz. the aspiration toward an idea of the self as otherwise than one is on the one side, and strategic manipulation of one’s public image, on the other? It is not only individuals who might experiment in this manner with changing names (Khosravi 2012), but also corporate entities from royal households to multinational corporations. Thus, for instance, during World War I, the British royal family changed its name from the House of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha to the house of Windsor to take away the foreign tinge in the name. 24 Coming to personal names, Copeman’s paper provides a discussion of strategies to change names on the part of several secularist and rationalist organisations in Punjab

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and elsewhere in India. He identifies two main strategies employed for the production of ‘secular names’: purification of the caste and religious connotations of names on the one hand, and multiplication of those connotations in the giving of boundary-crossing names on the other. Thus, for instance, using a generic term such as ‘Kumar’ as a surname removes caste , while conjoining a Hindu name with a Muslim one (Ram Rahim, Ashis Azam) creates a boundary crossing between Hindu and Muslim identities. Common to all such strategies is a rationale that seeks to break the association between the name and a pigeonholed identity. One could also look at sibling names in the case of Hindu-Muslim marriages in which one child might be given a Hindu name and the second a Muslim one, or consider approaches such as that employed by film actor Shahrukh Khan and his wife Gauri: ‘I gave my son and daughter names that could pass for generic (pan-Indian and pan-religious) ones: Aryan and Suhana. The Khan has been bequeathed by me so they can’t really escape it. I pronounce it from my epiglottis when asked by Muslims and throw the Aryan as evidence of their race when non-Muslims enquire.’11 25 While Copeman argues that the different strategies employed demonstrate the extent to which naming has become subject to experimentation amongst rationalists and secular activists, he is careful to point out that these strategies make sense only in the background of experiences of the close relation between name and social identity. We draw attention to the fact that even in cases such as that of the Arya Samaj,12 which banned the use of caste names, the strong association between naming and religious identity was important in their strategies of conversion—for instance, in their work among communities that were not clearly identified as either Hindu or Muslim, such as the Bishnoi community in parts of Rajasthan and . Bishnois considered themselves Hindu but practised many Islamic customs such as burying the dead instead of cremating them. Arya Samaj activists worked with the community not only to change such customs, but also to change names from Muslim to Hindu ones (Sikand & Katju 1994). In the opposite case, Chatterji (2012) reports on the traditional Muslim communities of scroll painters (Chitrakar) who earned their livelihood (and now their fame) by depicting Hindu mythological stories in their scroll paintings and in the accompanying narratives that they recited for their patrons. However, as aspirations for more purified Islamic identities began to take hold of their imagination of self, the pressure to shed their Hindu names began to mount.13 The point is that the strong association between name and caste or religion is itself a result of different processes by which boundaries of groups were solidified both by their interactions with the state and with various kinds of reform movements, caste associations, and other mechanisms for removing any ambiguity with regard to the straightforward identification of name with the social group. 26 The semiotic stability or instability of sacred names in a multi-religious milieu is the problematic of Henn’s essay on the genre of Puranas in which Christian stories were written in Goa. The essay asks, can the name of God be translatable? Are these translations evidence of attempts to build bridges across different religious groups or do they impose a stronger and more dominant language over the languages of groups that are falling into subordinate positions? 27 Is the name of God translatable? This is a question that has not only divided theologians but also influenced how we look at the academic study of religion. As Henn points out, at the heart of the idea of world religions is the notion that different

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religions are comparable because they have a conceptual and experiential place for the idea of ‘god’ that appears under different names. This notion may be challenged both by those who consider there to be a mystical link between name and deity (e.g. the phonetics of the name being tied to the kind of entity it is) and even more radically by the idea that a name might not function as a noun but as an adjectival quality, as argued by Das (2009) for Vedic . Offering a provocation on the notion of God from anthropology, Lambek (2009) argues that in translating the Nuer term kwoth by the term God for the most part in speech, Evans-Pritchard gets pulled in two different directions. Attentive to Nuer forms of speech, he sometimes treats kwoth as a product of discourse by systematically noting the situational quality of invocation and thus the range of meanings contained in the usage, but at other times use of the term God directs the reader to think of kwoth as a real and unitary being. For Henn too, as we shall see, the choice of a specific Konkani/Marathi term among the various ones available to translate the idea of the Christian God is never simply a question of technical problems of translation but indexes a particular play of power in competing claims over who holds the greater truth—Christians or Hindus? 28 Henn’s analysis of the Christian Purana literature in Portuguese controlled areas on the Western coast is subtle and nuanced, and above all, he is mindful of the context within which such literature was produced. Thus, he shows that at the same time missionaries such as Stephens were employing stylistic devices drawn from Vaishnavite devotional literature, there was a ruthless campaign of destroying Hindu temples, breaking the idols in the temples and burning the very books from which the devotional styles were taken to render the Christian stories of Christ or the Virgin Mary intelligible to the new converts. Henn gives a fascinating account of the names through which the term God is translated and that served to simultaneously designate and circumscribe its semantic range. Thus, names such as Deva Bāpa (Father God), Vaikunṭharāyā (Lord of Heaven) and Parameśvara (Supreme God) make the Christian God intelligible in local languages but also displace the Hindu gods—thus Vaikunṭha (heaven) is mentioned but the name of , who in Hindu cosmology is the ruler of heaven, is studiously avoided, suggesting that it is the Christian personages who are the creators and rulers of the world. Henn concludes on the sober note that the assumptions behind claims of greater tolerance and religious pluralism need to be treated with some caution, for underlying these ideas is the notion of religion as a universal. Yet attention to the issue of how exactly the vocabularies of Christianity, and especially the name of God, were translated into a Hindu world14 shows not simply an urge to make Christianity intelligible but also actions of iconoclastic destruction and semiotic appropriation/ misinterpretation of the religions that Christianity was encountering.

Publicity, vulnerability and the excess in the name

29 When we move from religion to economics, we might expect to find that names of products fall into a more rational scheme of things. We learn that not only do products have a price but that there is monetary value attached to brands. Journals in marketing research, cognitive psychology, and economics carry influential papers on brand equity, brand alliances, and the legal apparatus for protecting brand names. From the perspective of a theory of signalling, brand names concern the need to provide information to consumers about the unobservable qualities of the product that is being

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sold; to use the phenomenological idea of ‘appresentation,’ the brand name is appresentational in giving an account to consumers of ‘what lies spatially and temporally beyond their reach’ (Schutz & Luckman 1989: 2, 131–32).15 On the other hand, Tülin and Swait (1998) cite the marketing adage: ‘So the battle over brands will go on. Do not be fooled into thinking that it is really about baked beans, soap powder, or notebook computers. It is all about information. And it will continue for as long as buyers need and want that information. Don’t get left on the shelf.’ From the perspective of information theory, the market works on partial information—so just as standardisation of labels works to allow consumers to compare similar products (Teisl & Roe 1998) in terms of components (but not price), so brand names can be seen as differentiating devices that communicate a guarantee about a product’s quality as an aid for consumers to make rapid decisions. However, as it turns out, things are not so simple.

30 First, consider how names can also trick one into making decisions that are not based on rational calculation and second, how the surplus in the name—its hidden potential, if you will—releases a series of events (or quasi-events) that were not anticipated. 31 Cooper, Gulen, and Rau (2005) studied the fund flow patterns in mutual funds conditional on and found that there was a significant correlation between names that were changed to resonate with names of more successful firms in the market and increased flow of investment funds. On the other hand, when names were changed in a negative direction and resonated with names of other less successful fund management companies, there was a corresponding decline in the flow of funds. Significantly the change in name did not correspond to any change in the portfolios of the said mutual funds. This relation between change of name and flow of funds held even for the firms whose holdings did not materially reflect the implied by the new name—for instance, changing the name to include the term ‘large’ did not mean that the firm was changing its strategy toward larger holdings. In these cases, it would seem that names are not a signalling mechanism that provides quick information to consumers for decision-making but are rather a trigger for behaviour that responds to other mechanisms for decision-making. 32 The papers by Mazzarella, Heslop and Bharadwaj might be profitably read in tandem with the questions posed by the literature in economics and marketing research on whether names as they function in different kinds of markets (markets for brand names or for perishable goods) as well as in the public domain where claims over scientific reputations are monitored, bring out more than the function of signalling. 33 Mazzarella poses the question succinctly: what kind of name is a brand name and what relation does it bear to the proper name of a person or a definable physical entity such as a star or another insentient being? At the start one might say that in the case of humans, the name is embedded within a conversation—I might be addressed by another by my name and in turn I might proclaim my name to introduce myself to another. In contrast, insentient objects that are given names cannot make these names part of their own experience of being called (or interpellated). However, as Mazzarella shows, there can be a feeling of the ‘I’ as one slips in the course of a conversation to speak in the voice of a brand name.16 How do such notions as that of a voice help us understand what goes beyond the function of signalling in the name? 34 When we want to understand the meanings of words we do more than look them up in a dictionary, for an important aspect of learning how to use a word is learning how to

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project it into new situations. When it comes to brand names, Mazzarella shows that a brand name might be treated both as singular, since its function is to differentiate the product it represents from other products, and multiple, since as a brand name acquires publicity and garners trust around it, new products might be added to it. For example, how does Virgin extend from being a name for a recording label, to refer to a music store, to hotels, or to an airline? Is there a surplus in the name that gathers meaning through these extensions? Mazzarella gives us a fascinating glimpse into board room discussions as marketing and advertising executives seek to decide on a brand name that would assist in opening up a market for a new product and wrestle with the issue of how the new name would relate to the mother (i.e. original) brand. How would a name signal that it is a sub-brand and not become a substitute for the original brand by overcoming it completely? What was being marketed was a new combination of products, now available in one package, which were otherwise available as single products. In such cases, how would a marketing executive imagine becoming a consumer asking for that product by using the new name? Reviving the notion of participation in the manner in which early anthropologists (e.g. Lévy-Bruhl 1926) thought of totemic names as sharing a substance with the image of the , as well as the animal itself, Mazzarella provides one important route to think of names and the surplus they contain beyond reference. 35 The vulnerability of the name in the case of brand names which try to create markets for products within the scene of stranger sociality, as Mazzarella notes, comes from the mimetic ability to copy the name and use it for an inferior product, or to take a similar sounding name (a practice we saw documented in the case of financial management firms) and thus to steal a part of the name and the market share. In the case of the wholesale vegetable market in Dambulla, in the middle of Sri Lanka, studied by Heslop, it is signboards that are carefully designed to not only convey information but also to build trust in the product by references to family name, and to invite the consumer to a particular kind of participation with the product that would signal the legitimacy of new desires. Yet there is only so much you can do when the product in question is fresh vegetables—highly perishable and almost too quotidian—and the vegetable sellers are already of low status in the moral economy of caste. Yet, Heslop is able to open up a different dimension of names as he shows how the signboards of small businesses and the names they carry provide condensed histories of past relations within the family and kinship group. His discussion, for instance, of Saman Bakers, a family owned business run by a young man, Saman, is illuminating. At first glance, one might be led to think that the signboard with his name is surely indicative of the young man Saman’s autonomy and capacity for independent decision making. Yet one learns that the son did not choose to name the bakery after himself; it was the father who gave the name of his son to the bakery, but he did not relinquish financial control over it. Thus moving in a reverse mode, the name of the son becomes, along with the bakery named after him, the property of the father. This is not only a textual inference on the part of Heslop but rather a result of close observation of the interactions between father and son, as well as the stories of familial conflict and frustration that Saman shares. There are other cases, of course, in which new familial relations are created or strengthened by the movements of names between persons and signs; there are also instances of consultations with monks or other religious personages to arrive at a name that will be auspicious and bring good fortune. The references to luck and the ability to arrive at the right name that will not be a mismatch between business aspirations and the

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hidden potential contained in the name for good or evil, point to a moral economy in which notions of luck, fortune and misfortune—perhaps an occulting of the obviousness of the relation between names and caste or kinship—is seen as an essential feature of survival in the fierce competition of the market and its presumed impersonality. 36 Bharadwaj’s paper in this volume engages some of the discussion in Mazzarella’s by asking: what does a name mean as a common noun and what adjectives might describe its qualities? Or to put it differently, what does it mean to have a ‘good’ name or a ‘bad’ name, the latter felicitously captured in the Hindi/Urdu usage of the term badnam? Although Bharadwaj’s research is on stem cell therapy and the struggle over maintaining a good reputation, he does not start with the political economy of science, or with what one might call a market for truth. Instead, he starts at a completely different place, with figures of desire, viz. the way names might figure in an open embrace of badnam in the scene of love. It is not only the literary figures of high culture, such as Meera Bai and Majnun, who stake their public reputation by falling in love—madly, insanely, with the wrong kind of person (socially speaking)—yet as they lose their ‘name’ in the context of the social, they re-emerge with a legendary reputation as lovers in another register of life and literature. Figures in the more raucous public culture of melas (fairs) and folk theatres too celebrate the risky, dangerous terrain of desire. The song Bharadwaj cites is ‘Munni badnam hui darling tere liye’ (Munni became badnam darling, for you), though he does not go to the second line that lustily proclaims, ‘Main Jhandu Bam hui darling tere liye’ (I became Jhandu Bam [name of a cream to be applied for aches and pains], darling for you), which speaks not to eternal love but to the pleasure of becoming a bazari woman—the common name for a prostitute.17 Interestingly, the nautanki song on which the Bollywood song was based was, ‘launda badnam hua laundi tere liye’18 (the boy became badnam, oh girl, for you). The politics of taking the male common name launda (boy) and replacing it with a female proper name (Munni) in the Bollywood song would take us too far away from the present topic. However, we detect that the love affair of the song casts its shadow on another affair—this time relating to cutting edge stem-cell therapy that the clinical director of a small clinic pursues, but outside global protocols. The badnami, or ignominy, that comes to be attached to her practice raises the question: is the badnami (bad name) borne by her akin to the embrace of badnami by the figures of Meera and Majnu, or is there a taint of commercialism that is hinted at in the Munni song through the features of encryption that Bharadwaj posits as an essential feature of the name? Put more starkly and without the delicacy that Bharadwaj writes with, one might then ask—are those who claim spectacular successes with therapies that are not yet approved pursuing science or sullying it in the bazaar for their own gains? Let us leave Bollywood songs for now and come to the question in a more straightforward way. 37 The clinical director of the small clinic in Delhi that Bharadwaj documents here and elsewhere, offers embryonic stem cells as therapy for a variety of otherwise incurable conditions, but her therapeutic procedures do not follow international procedures. Although Bharadwaj has followed some patients who were treated in her clinic and who experienced significant improvement in their conditions, one might say, the jury is still out. Meanwhile, the clinic and the claims of the director for the success of stem cell therapy for these conditions has attracted a lot of international and national bad press. She has been accused of being a charlatan who is risking the lives of her patients

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by giving them untested therapy for her own profit. She claims that conducting double- blind clinical trials, seen as the gold standard for clinical research, would require the setting up of control groups who would receive placebos for comparison with the groups receiving the experimental therapy. However, she does not find it ethical to deny patients therapy when she has evidence she trusts that they can be cured or at least given a new lease of life. In an uncanny way the language she uses contains the very concepts usually promulgated by regulatory regimes (for instance, the ethics of giving placebos when lives are in danger was successfully contested by HIV activists in the eighties; experimental drugs for the terminally ill are made available even before their safety is fully established). Yet mainstream researchers fail to recognise that the concepts the clinical director is using in her defence are the same that have been used in exceptional cases when there is a risk of a new epidemic or when patients are terminally ill and may choose to use drugs whose safety and efficacy are not established. Bharadwaj does not offer any judgment on the truth claims of either side. What he does show is that the spectre of badnam falls over this research in part, at least, because it is being done in India. There is a process of contamination in which the name of the clinic comes to be metonymically associated with the name of India, but there is also the opposite move of the restoration of a name. The dynamic of the name he observes is that of a previously good name becoming sullied, even destroyed, and then attempts are made for a new name to be constituted from these debris. Some will reach that point when their reputations will be restored but others, such as Dr Subhas Mukherjee whose claims for having produced the first test-tube baby in India (and the second in the world) were discredited, might be destroyed. Dr Mukherjee took his own life in 1981 and, though he was posthumously honoured for his contributions to reproductive and infertility medicine, he could not survive the dynamic of destruction and reconstruction of names. 38 It is to the darker potentials contained in the name, that Bharadwaj so nicely sets up, to which we turn in the next and final section. There, we see the intimacy between death and the name in sharper focus.

Death, occult, and the name

39 Names make some realities manifest as they also occult other aspects of the real. Bruce’s paper on names in Urdu literature allows us to think of the relation between death and names, although it also does many other things. In Urdu poetry, as Bruce points out, it is common to use a , called the takhallus. This is both a practice of self-naming and of self-creating by giving oneself a double. Such doubles were also created in Bollywood films, and Bruce captures nicely the irony with which Manto, the doyen of Urdu literature, reflects on how Muslim names were changed into Hindu names for publicity in order to correct what directors and publicists feared might appear as the disharmony of a Muslim hero portraying, say, a Hindu saint. Manto also produces biting satire on the pretensions of the progressive writers movement, which had castigated and ostracised him for his so-called ‘obscenity’ in such stories as ‘Bu’ (smell), through his observations on the literary conventions of takhallus. Bruce cites the following passage: Qateel Shifai’s parents certainly did him wrong when they named him Aurangzeb. Progressive poetry and traditionalist, conservative Aurangzeb!? Who isn’t with Miraji’s work? He, too, is a poet, and such a progressive poet that most of his

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work is above and beyond people’s understanding. His original name was Sanaullah, the meaning of which is clear [praise of Allah]. If he had remained Sanaullah, he would have been compelled to write poems whose meaning would have been clear, but because this was not Sanaullah’s purpose in life, and he wanted to write mysterious kinds of poetry, he had to name himself something of this kind. Manto is suggesting here the superficial way in which takhallus, the pen name, functions as nothing more than a mask—the real people designated by the conservative names these writers bore as their given names announce themselves not only in their poetry but also in their sensibilities, as displayed in ostracizing Manto even as he was charged under obscenity laws in Pakistan. 40 Bruce also gives a compelling analysis of the short story, Yazid, on how a man tries to reverse the physiognomy of the hated name Yazid, usually shunned by Muslims for his culpability in the death of the Prophet’s grandson, Husain. To everyone’s surprise, he names his new-born son Yazid and defends his action by saying he hopes for a different kind of Yazid—not a killer but a restorer of life. In the hate-filled post Partition environment of India and Pakistan, this double act of receiving a past differently and changing the way we look at the future as the unfolding of a plot of given enmities is remarkable; and doubly so in that this critique is done through the simple act of naming (see also the discussion by Copeman on aspirations expressed in secular names.)19

41 Bruce opens up a very interesting discussion of what a doubling of a name might mean. His essay takes us to other scenes in Urdu poetry where the name occurs as part of the poem, to elevating or devastating effect. Take Ali Sardar Jafri, an important poet in the progressive writers group, whose writing may not achieve the heights of Manto or Faiz, but who aspires to a death and a rebirth through his poetry. We cite two couplets (our translation). Phir ik din aisa aayega aankhon ke diye bujh jayenge Haathon ke kanwal kumhlayenge Then such a day will come, the lamps of the eyes will be extinguished The lotus of the hands will wilt 42 The thought is carried forward in a deepening imagery of dying and withering to turn at the end toward a scene of regeneration when his spirit will permeate the blue of the rivers and the green of the plants. For our purpose what is most interesting is the use of proper names, his own and that of his wife, toward the end of the poem. aur sara zamana dekhega har kissa mera afsana hai har aashiq hai Sardar yahan har mashooka Sultana hai Then the whole world will see Every legend is my story Every lover is Sardar here And every beloved is Sultana The use by the poet of his own name and the name of his beloved lays claim to the legends of love as telling every ordinary person’s story too. Recall here Bharadwaj’s discussion of the figures of Meera and Majnun (not to speak of Munni), who embrace the badnami of loving madly. Jafri does a reverse move here—he claims his story to be the story of legends. Sardar and Sultana who love diurnally, it is claimed, are able to suffuse the world with their love as much as those who love eternally.20 Names then

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participate (to use the verb favoured by Mazzarella, rightly we think) in the scene of death but they are also the anchors that help the poet to reach beyond death.21 43 A much darker vision appears in a simple of act of listing names in the Bengali poet Jibanananda Das’s poem entitled ‘1946–1947’, perhaps the greatest poem ever written on the violence of the Partition. We give here some fragments in which names appear in the lovely translation by Joe Winter: They sleep. If I call then from the wave-roaring river of blood He will approach and say ‘I am Yasin Hanif Mohammad Maqbool Karim Aziz- And you? So putting his palm on my chest and raising his eyes From his dead face he will ask—again the blood-river Will swell in reply, ‘Gagan, Bipin, Shashi of Pathuriaghata, of Maniktala, Shyambbazar, Galif Street, Entally— […] Time speaks; but to whom? Yasin Maqbool, Shashi Suddenly approach but before they say It is as if from the deep heart of fragmented eternity A host of things are said; yet Eternity is indivisible; and so those dreams Into undivided eternity have vanished; No one’s there, nothing’s there—the sun is extinct. (Extract from J. Das 2003) The running sequence of names—immediately recognisable as Muslim on one side and Hindu on the other—condense in themselves everything that was broken and fragmented. Eternity absorbs them, but unlike in the memory of literature, here names are not evoked to make their presence felt but are evoked to say that no traces are left: even the sun is extinct. Hearing lists of names has an uncanny effect. Think of reading the names of Jews who were deported in the small memorials or placards that spring up and confront you in a visit to Berlin—at the Grunwald station, on apartment buildings, on small placards nailed to the street to interrupt your walk (Brandel 2015). Names manifest a ghostly present even as the events are only suggested—not given any detailed description.22 44 The theme that animates Das’s paper is that of the unbearable name—both one’s own and that of the other. Our names, like our signatures, open the world to us but also open us to the world, and the cases from literature, and from her ethnography that Das directs our eyes toward, are those in which saying or not saying the name is a matter of life and death. Only, the notion of death here is of the harm that human beings do to each other, such that their own or the other’s existence itself becomes unbearable to them.

45 In his remarkable interpretation of the film Now, Voyager, Cavell puts the matter of names as follows: The story of Now, Voyager can be understood as the retelling of the fantasy of the ugly duckling. It is a recounting for grown-ups of the way a name can make you (count yourself) ugly, that tells how hard it is for a human being to find the way to her or his (legitimate?) name, the name of the kind to which one is kin.’ (Cavell 1990: 241) In the episode from the Ramacharitamans that Das analyses, Bharata (Rama’s younger brother) learns the treachery of his mother Kaekeyi in causing Rama to be exiled to the forest so that Bharata could inherit the kingdom. One of the ways Bharata expresses his

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anguish and shame is to ask if he is worthy of the name he has. To restore one’s name to oneself, Das shows, is not simply the work that one does on one’s self but also the way in which others can testify to the authenticity of one’s name and one’s experience to oneself. 46 The name is also a lethal weapon. In one of the ethnographic vignettes, Das describes the case of a woman who deliberately uses the proper name of her husband precisely in a gesture of breaking the prohibition on wives taking the name of the husband, because it is said that every time a woman pronounces the name of her husband she reduces his life by one day. These are small acts of vengeance the woman performs on her uncaring husband who, as she said, could make her repeatedly pregnant but not care to see that the babies survived. The death of her children encodes for her an uncaring world—and though she might not have the vocabulary to give expression to her rage and despair, the name does it for her. In another case, a woman holds the name of her abuser in her body; tightly enclosing it, for letting it be released in the world would bring absolute chaos. These qualities of the name are addressed in quotidian ways in ritual practices of giving a ‘shield name’ (kavach naam) so that sorcerers and demons cannot lay hold of the real one. John Beattie (1957) remarked that personal names among the Banyoro were mostly indicative of the themes of death, sorrow, poverty and neighbourly strife. But if names express the lethal conditions of social life through the singular mechanism of personification, they also provide ways in which we can sense the invisible connections through which we might be connected not only to kin and friends but also to total strangers, as Dowdy shows in describing how he discovered what it is to share a name.

47 Dowdy’s paper concerns the contingent connections that names alert us to and the work that must be done to overcome this contingency. Drawing on long-term fieldwork in Mayong, central Assam, Dowdy points out that personal names unite with the person’s body and express his or her destiny, and hence choosing the name of a person is a laborious, high-stakes process. The name is divined via complex ritual procedures involving consumption of and anointment with rice beer, the sacrifice of a red cock, and the divining of auspicious letters from the sacrificed cock’s intestines. The name derives from one body, so to speak, before being inserted into another. Despite the care taken and attention to cosmological detail, the name remains a site of acute vulnerability as the potential access point (for a hostile , for instance) to the very life of its bearer. It is therefore perhaps not surprising that the name, in particular situations, becomes a species of tabooed speech (cf. Das this issue). Combining a sophisticated reading of taboo theory with a highly personal account of what it means to utter a name-sharer’s name, Dowdy is able to show how two persons having the same name must share some substance and also a common destiny—for the (shared) name has ‘a particular fate built into it.’ Uttering the name of one’s namesake—the taboo in question—activates the latent closeness that the term ‘mita’ (friend) would euphemise—necessary misrecognition turns into dizzying, dangerous recognition. One’s fate is no longer one’s own. Maintenance of the taboo does not mean that singularity is maintained, but it does mitigate what might otherwise be a calamitous sense of being overrun by another’s lifeworld. More treacherous still, Dowdy’s paper carries forth the very transgression it throws light on. 48 ‘Of names,’ said Hobbes (1651), ‘some are ‘proper,’ and singular to one only thing, as ‘Peter,’ ‘John,’ ‘this man,’ ‘this tree’; and some are ‘common’ to many things, ‘man,’

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‘horse,’ ‘tree’—every of which, though but one name, is nevertheless the name of divers particular things; in respect of all which together it is called an ‘universal,’ there being nothing in the world universal but names; for the things named are every one of them individual and singular.’ It is not only Dowdy’s paper in this volume that complicates such a picture, but it does so in a particularly interesting way. For Hobbes, though one name may indeed be common to many things (name a multiplicity), those things remain in themselves ‘individual and singular.’ In Mayong, however, the is a kind of substance shared across its bearers and so entwining their fates—and we discussed earlier how sameness of name comes in and out of focus, as of a piece with sameness of substance. While we do not have space to elaborate the particular place of names in conceptions of code-substance, we might conceive of them as a kind of substance open to both monist and dualistic thinking, with the papers in the volume showing tensions between both modes. Where the doubling of the name in takhallus is one of self-naming indistinct from self-creation—compare with Nietzsche’s (2004: 52) comments in Ecce Homo on how all prior references to the name of Wagner in his work should be substituted with his own—the doubling of the name in Mayong is one of sheer contingency: the name is doubled on the edge of the abyss.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Appadurai, Arjun (2000) ‘Spectral Housing and Urban Cleansing’, Public Culture, 12(3), pp. 627–51.

Azaryahu, Maoz (2011) ‘The Critical Turn and Beyond: The Case of Commemorative Street Naming’, ACME: An International E-Journal for Critical Geographies, 10(1), pp. 28–33.

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NOTES

1. For further elaboration on concepts such as life and having a life, see Das (2015). 2. The colonial adoption of early biometric forms such as fingerprinting (Singha 2000) and photography (Pinney 1997) was in part designed to mitigate the recurrence and changeability of personal names. But onomastic recurrence was and is still foregrounded as a problem, from

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confusion at the Kumbh Mela when public announcements of the names of one or two lost children are responded to by thousands of pilgrims (Sharma 2005: 127), to complaints about the weak referentiality of Sikh surnames Singh and Kaur (see below), to the ghostly duplication of names (without bodies) that the present-day Aadhaar biometric scheme seeks to ‘correct’ but frequently ends up reproducing (Cohen 2012). 3. The focus of his Deseriis’s work is on collective pseudonyms as multiple-use aliases employed by activists at times of political crisis when extant modes of address and reference fall short. His case studies extend from Ned Ludd through to the Internet collective Anonymous. See below on another kind of shield name. 4. http://ww2.kqed.org/news/09/16/FacebookDragQueens 5. The weak referentiality of Singh and Kaur can provide travel and immigration problems for Sikhs. The Canadian government, for instance, had a longstanding policy of rejecting applications offering such names as surnames, forcing applicants to legally change/add to their names. Often, the additional name would be a caste name. With more than an echo of the nominative politics of the colonial census, caste titles are thus instituted due less to resurgence of a ‘caste mentality’ than a bureaucratic demand to fix the reference. South Indian naming conventions also frequently present a problem of legibility for western visa and immigration authorities: length of name, absence of surname, and use of initials are all cited as reasons for this. But use of initials had other, altogether more constructive effects: ‘There was an interesting way in which the English language became handy for the [low-caste] community. Several people of Urmilatai’s [Pawar] generation and even some older ones changed their derogatory or godly first names by adopting English initials—like L.R. Tambe or K.D. Kadam for instance’ (Rege 2006: 289). See also Bruce’s paper in this volume on Urdu writers’ use of initials. 6. The sovereign gifts of censorship and of the name converge completely in the Censor Board’s inclusion of Bombay on a list of proscribed words. Thanks to Edward Anderson for alerting us to this. 7. Times of India, 22 Nov. 2014. 8. On the origins of the importance of the name of Rama in bhakti worship see Doniger (2009: 247–48). 9. Puranas are a genre of sacred text through which the history of a kingdom, a community, or a place is recorded. Although there is an interesting debate in India about the specific texture of texts that stylistically code historical consciousness versus the claim that the very notion of history is at stake, we take the Puranas and mahātmyas on their own terms as far as the arguments on names are concerned (see Das 1976, Guha 2001, Nandy 1995, Rao et al. 2001). 10. See discussion in Menon (2012) on the politics of maiden names, and the work of Dr Sudha Kankaria’s Beti Bachav (Save Girl Child) NGO which, amongst other gender equality programmes, has conducted mass renaming ceremonies for girls (usually the third or fourth born) with the name Nakusa or Nakoshi (Unwanted) in Satara Dist., . 11. http://www.ndtv.com/india-news/read-shah-rukh-khans-article-which-appeared-in- outlook-turning-points-2013-511771. See Copeman’s paper in this issue on the name of Shahrukh and Gauri Khan’s third child, AbRam. 12. A radically monotheistic socio-religious organisation, the Arya Samaj has engaged in Hindu reformist activity since its inception in 1875 by Swami Dayananda Saraswati, pursuing campaigns against idolatry and caste. 13. See Virani (2011) for a related discussion of Ismaeli Guptis of Bhavnagar, whose ‘pre- cautionary dissimulation’ takes the form not of Sunni imitation (as is more common among Ismaelis in other places), but of passing as Hindus, for instance, through the use of identifiably Hindu names. 14. Compare with the medieval Hindu-Sanskritic glosses for words and names introduced to the region by the Turks, where ‘the Ghorids became the Gauri-kula (“family of fair people” or “family

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of the golden goddess []”), sultans became Sura-tranas (“protectors of the gods”), and Mohammad (or Mahmud) became Maha-muda (“great joy”)’ (Doniger 2009: 447). See also Barrow (2003) for the name of the country as Hindustan. 15. As Husserl (1960: 109) put it, ‘the strictly seen front of a physical thing always and necessarily appresents a rear aspect and prescribes for it a more or less determinate content’ (Husserl 1960: 109). But if the accent in brand names is on quality, with gods it is qualities. A corollary to the Godhead or Brahman being free of, or beyond, all names (Kellenberger 1979) can be their having very many of them. ‘The Vishnu Sahasranama enumerates the god’s 1,000 names. The name he is known by is ‘according to the aspect [of his ] envisaged’ (Daniélo 1991: 151). The relation between namelessness and having many names is also explored in Steinberg’s paper in this volume. 16. See also Das (2015) for a related discussion on how the movement between the first, second, and third person was central to the theories of the grammatical person of the Kashmiri philosopher Abhinavgupta (late 10th, early 11th century) and the understanding of what it is to become a sentient being through being addressed. 17. Notice the movement from the third person in the first line (Munni) and the first person in the second line (main). 18. Nautanki refers to a genre of popular theatre performed in fairs and festivals in different parts of north India. I (Veena) recalled this song from one such nautanki fair held in Meerut in 1952, which I attended as a small child tagging along with other adults from a nearby village in which I lived for a short period. In much of popular media now, this song is referred to as a Bhojpuri song. Neither of the two editors have the expertise to determine the correct origin of the song. 19. See also Copeman (2012) for a related discussion on how (re)naming is central to a critique of Sikh orthodoxy enacted by the devotional movement the Dera Sacha Sauda. Sovereign acts of (re)naming may authorise particular criticisms and sentiments as legitimate—as in removing the entitlement of using the prefix ‘sir’ from disgraced UK public figures. 20. It is always easier to love eternally than to love diurnally, as the philosopher Stanley Cavell (1981) once remarked. 21. Though this might take us a little away from the discussion at hand, we cannot help citing the couplets from a poem by Faiz Ahmed Faiz: ‘maidan-e-wafa darbar nahin, yahan namo-nasal ki pooch kahan, kuch ishq kisi ki zaat nahin, aashiq to kisi ka naam nahin’ (the field of love is not a royal court, no one asks for name or here; love is not the name of anyone’s caste, nor is lover the name of a person). 22. Further uneasiness arises from the role of name lists as accessories to the events they are also used to remember. Writing of the riots in after the demolition of the Babri Masjid mosque in Ayodhya on December 6 1992, Appadurai (2000: 648) notes how ‘Muslims were cornered in slums and middle-class areas, in their own crowded spaces, hunted down with lists of names in the hands of organised mobs.’

INDEX

Keywords: names, naming, brand names, vulnerability, deities, translation, place names, description, singularity, dissimulation, name change, death, occult, publicity, reference, state

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AUTHORS

VEENA DAS

Department of Anthropology, John Hopkins University, Baltimore

JACOB COPEMAN

School of Social and Political Science, University of Edinburgh

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Remaining Nameless: Names, Hiding, and Dislocation Among Delhi’s Runaways

Jonah Steinberg

of the thought of the thought of the thought of his name his ineffable effable effanineffable Deep and inscrutable singular name. TS Eliot 1 This is an account of three ways Indian street-dwelling children, most of them runaways, use names to circumvent, play with, and navigate the constellations of power in which they move. These structures of power may govern both identity and physical existence, and include structures of production and consumption, nation- state, culture, space, and class—and the various places these forms collude and converge. For children unhitched from kin, who constitute in the public eye a kind of incomplete subject, and, in the administrative lens, a partial citizen, these disciplinary structures, far from fixed, allow for—or even invite—a great deal of play. The walls they mount are malleable.

2 One such mode of play comes in the form of hiding, of using various techniques of deception and dissimulation to obfuscate the pieces of identity that are rooted in origins —in place, in kin, in former institutional iterations of self. For Indian child runaways, those origins are, in general, to be negated or refashioned. The origins are the locus of various forms of power, various intimate tyrannies, which the children have identified as oppressive and unfree and thus from which they have elected (usually) to run.1 A kind of narrative hiding is possible, or a hiding through narrative, and the irreducible, kernel of that narrative is the personal name. Child runaways in North India engage names in exceptionally creative and complex ways to obscure former iterations of self. It is as though the street child, as runaway, is a new incarnation, an avātara 2 with only a tenuous relationship to its past existences.

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3 And hiding from what, or whom? What could it possibly matter if some well- or ill- meaning tourist or policeman knows if a child’s name is (was) Ramsingh or Ashok or Amir Qalam? 4 Well, for one thing, it could: if (or once) registered by a charity or a governmental ‘remand home,’ child runaways appear in full-page newspaper advertisements, complete with mug shot and physical description. On June 1, 2007, for example, the Delhi Department of Woman and Child Welfare ran a full page notice in the Times of India with a banner identifying it as a list of ‘Children Separated from Their Families.’ Below the banner appear photographs of twenty-two boys; next to each photo, a phenotypic description, a place of putative origin, a , and some auxiliary information: THIS BOY RAKESH ALIAS TULSI S/O SHRI MAGAN, DABRI WAS ADMITTED IN THE ORGANIZATION ON 26.8.2004. AT THE TIME OF ADMISSION HIS AGE WAS AROUND EIGHT YEARS, HEIGHT 4 FEET 5 INCH, COMPLEXION DUSKY TO BLACKISH, BODY MEDIUM, FACE OVAL. IDENTIFICATION: A CUT ON LEFT LEG. ADDRESS AS TOLD BY THE BOY: VILLAGE BANTA NAGAR, DISTT. TATA NAGAR, .3 THIS BOY JITENDRA KUMAR ALIAS BAJRANGI S/O SHRI ARJUN SINGH WAS AROUND 8 YEARS OLD AT THE TIME OF ADMISSION IN THE ORGANIZATION, COMPLEXION BLACK, FACE OVAL, PRESENT HEIGHT 4 FEET 6 INCH, IDENTIFICATION MARK: SCAR OF BURN NEAR RIGHT EYE. THE ADDRESS AS TOLD BY THE CHILD, VILLAGE JHUGGI, 4 TWO K.M. AWAY FROM , TEMPLE OF BAJRANG BALI, LUCKNOW, U.P. THE BOY WAS BROUGHT BY POLICE STATION NEW DELHI RAILWAY STATION ON 8.10.2003. To evade being tracked, documented, represented, and located in spaces just such as this, children on India’s streets often quite assiduously avoid interacting with charitable nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) that may collaborate with government agencies: these NGOs periodically put children at the center of vigorous and pointed campaigns aimed at what is termed ‘repatriation,’ bringing the child back home based on the notion or belief that home is necessarily the place where children should be, and is always better than ‘the street,’ even if in campaigns to ‘getting children off the street’ it is not clear whether it is the aesthetics of the street or the child’s taint that is in question (see Hecht 2000, Scheper-Hughes & Hoffman 1998 on the cleansings of the street that target street children). As an ethnographer, I usually had to convince the runaways with whom I worked that I had nothing to do with any of these organizations and that no particular information that would identify them would make it back to said NGOs. 5 Here, then, the three modes of engaging with names/namelessness I problematize, and that are especially captivating, are as follows: (1) the aforementioned adoption of self- fashioned conventional names, often crossing communal boundaries, as a piece of protecting identity and in general enjoying the notion of untrackability; (2) the assignment (usually self-embraced) of names denoting some identifiable embodied feature—a missing limb, dark skin, an unusual body shape; and (3) a complex and poignant strategic use of categorical historically-determined names for ‘urchins’ and ‘vagabonds.’ I want to think on how the variable use of such categorical names suggests an inchoate collective consciousness of shared structural experience—and a corresponding solidarity that can, as with the duplicitous use of personal names, be tied to the same particular relationship to systems that record and enumerate, from newspapers to police forces, families to children’s shelters—that shapes the complex dissimulative use of names of every sort, personal, ascriptive, and collective.

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Locating the Typified Runaway

6 I am obliged to say more about who the proverbial runaway I am describing is—a necessarily broad generalization of a type that emerges on what the public calls the ‘streets,’ even if it is precisely such broad generalizations that fail to accord these people the right to name themselves.

7 In North Indian cities, a significant proportion of street children are runaways from rural villages. Many of these young runaways frame their departure from the village for the city as an active, intentional choice (McFadyen 2004; Conticini & Hulme 2007). Moreover, in most cases, children frame their own decisions to run away as a socially- accepted life option. At the heart of the ethnographer’s proposition that running away does represent a timeworn and accepted life option, if she is to take the runaway’s own stories seriously, is a concern with a set of historical conditions, a certain intersection of political economy and domestic crisis (Wallerstein 2004: 37; Jodhka 2003), which could make such an experience seem ordinary and normal. I suggest that colonialism, industrial capitalism, and globalization have produced radical transformations of the countryside—for example in the colonial period via indigo (see Pouchepadass 1999) or later via the green revolution (Cullather 2010)—and of the relationship of the rural to the urban through histories of labor and the railway (see Prakash 1990, Bear 2007, Aguiar 2011), which profoundly impact children’s experiences in the domestic sphere and in the local community. Thus it is not critical poverty itself from which children flee, but rather the oblique impact of routinized and normalized disparities of wealth on homes and emotional lives. As Conticini and Hulme (2007) observe of (largely runaway) street children in Bangladesh: ‘the breakdown of social relationships within the household, and not economic poverty, is the main cause of child migration to the street’ (207). Consider the following arrival narrative from an adolescent runaway from New Delhi Railway Station I will refer to as . The V in the interview is ‘Vikas,’ J is the author, and K is the author’s research partner, Khushboo. J: Did you run away? How old were you? N: Five years old, in second grade when I was five. J: What about you? V: I came in anger. J: From Himachal too? V: No not from Himachal. J: How did you know that you could take a train? N: My house was as close to the station as this station is to Paharganj. My house. I just thought of taking a train and going a little ways. I didn’t know that the train was going to drop me at Delhi. It took me a day and a half to reach here. I got down from the train, I got out at the station, there was a water seller and he offered me some water and some chhola kulcha, and I started collecting bottles and studying a little bit with a very good didi. I did some good studies and then that didi stopped coming. I kept collecting bottles and collecting bottles and then I started to feel ashamed about that act. K: Weren’t you scared when you left home, being so young? N: What fear? I came because I was angry. I didn’t leave with any idea of whether I would return or not. I just came out with the idea that my parents would get worried, look for me and then I would eventually return. I thought that they would become frightened for me and stop beating me and love me. I left home with this thought.

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J: Did you ever go back? N: No I never went back. J: Have you spoken to anyone else? N: I have a brother [ek bhai hai mera]. He lives in Delhi. J: Do your parents know you’re alive? N: My father is dead. J: When? N: My brother told me that my father was death.5 J: Were you sad about that? N: Of course I was sad. 8 Running away is certainly a key process in the formation of populations of street children worldwide (Dos Santos 2002; Conticini & Hulme 2007), but it appears more common in South Asia than elsewhere. Street children’s journeys may shed important light on more fundamental issues surrounding childhood, especially on how children respond to family stresses brought on by larger processes of political economy, how children express intentionality in the face of domestic violence and overwhelming work expectations (see Conticini & Hulme 2007; Karlekar 2003; Nieuwenhuys 1994; McFadyen 2004; Margolin & Gordis 2000), and how children behave in the absence of the expected sources of adult supervision. Running away in epistemological contexts, for their part, contravenes the expectations of Indian and global institutions and ideologies which prescribe what a ‘proper’ or ‘correct’ childhood constitutes. Other categories of street children, including those who live with their families, or those like orphans who are on the street due to circumstances beyond their control, do not necessarily defy such prescriptive visions of childhood.

9 Above all, what is legible (or at least faintly discernible) in runaways’ tracks, transits, and trajectories is a kind of drastic transformation of rural social fabrics, enacted most fundamentally through debt, which comes to life in family stresses and an alternative to which (or escape from which) is given form in the very threads of industry and postcolonial anomie which were part of its production—the channels of railway, labor migration, and postcolonial itinerancy as a strategy of evasion.

Methods

10 This research was conducted as part of a four-year, NSF supported project,6 ethnographic fieldwork for which was intensive. Research covered some 20–25 distinct sites in New Delhi, in all cases repeatedly and in most frequently; and some 25–30 sites across India, in many cases repeatedly and in some frequently. The core concern of the research was to ascertain the key determinants and antecedents underlying children’s decisions to run away from home, to identify the circulation of discourses on and of running away, and to locate historical factors that can be correlated to differential frequencies in solo childhood departures from home.

11 Primary sites in Delhi included Hazrat Nizamuddin , Hazrat Nizamuddin Railway Station, New Delhi Railway Station, Railway Station, Okhla Mandi, Vasant Vihar Market, Jama Masjid, Hanuman Mandir, Yamuna Bazaar and Peti Market, Meena Bazaar, Matia Mahal, Mehrauli, Connaught Place, Anand Vihar, and many others. Primary sites across India, with the support of Khushboo Jain, included villages, towns, and cities in Bihar, , Uttar Pradesh, West Bengal, Maharashtra, Orissa, Rajasthan, Kerala, Tamil Nadu, and many other sites. City studies were carried out in

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Lucknow, Calcutta, Mumbai, Malda, Patna, Ranchi and Cochin. Data collected in these sites incorporates interview material, spontaneous conversation, documentation of movement patterns, elicitation of life stories, demographic surveys, organizational archives, imperial archives, and much more. Observation was also made of individual runaways over time to ensure the longitudinal integrity of the project, which fostered the development of a broad understanding of the historical antecedents of running away, in particular as regards landlessness, credit relations, and multiple forms of rural debt. Other major lines of inquiry developed over the course of the research included an exploration of the role of industrial-era railroads in the process of running away, of experiences of death and loss as a factor in departure, and of interaction with charitable and governmental institutions. ‘Tribal’ identity has emerged as a major determinant among runaway populations. Living patterns and spatial dynamics in railway stations and elsewhere proved a complex and interesting feature of runaways’ lives.

Naming Danger: The Urgency of Counternymic Evasion

12 Why do these street children want to hide, if they’ve come this far and find themselves already sufficiently unfindable?

13 These children have largely left home of their own accord and without their family’s blessing to come to the city. They’ve left domestic and local traumas and crises and fled to a situation they see as better, for all its stress, risk, and hardship. And so once there, they do not want to be tracked, do not want to be returned to their families, and they seek what they themselves term freedom. It is certainly not they are seeking, though that term is surely what society-at-large, and even scholarly observers would use—for indeed they seek, they embrace the having of a name, just not the one that is given them by the ossified forms that trapped them before, forms of patriarchal kinship and marriage, intimate force, discipline and labor. It is, rather, the active engagement of what might be termed a counter-nymic (or anti-nymic) praxis, wherein names are the domain of active and defiant authoring. This is, indeed, a form of evasive mobility, I suppose, of a sort. A ‘nomadics’—not spatial, but discursive. Foucault (1995) highlights the operation of power at the intersection of mobility and fixity, noting that ‘one of the primary objects of discipline is to fix; it is an anti-nomadic technique’ (218). Deleuze and Guattari’s ‘nomadology’ (1987), further, imagines a new and more fluid relationship between subject and territory, wherein the typified ‘nomads’ fashion their own space. However, the mobility or nomadology enacted by runaways is far more profoundly rooted in material conditions and the set of possible responses thereto (escape, resistance, evasion) than the sort of fluidity envisioned by Deleuze and Guattari. 14 And indeed this assertion is nothing without historicization. And for this to be historicized, the very forces that motivate such a mandate must themselves be named: the state, for example, in myriad forms, including child prisons, ‘welfare services,’ and murky forms of legal registration, including the Juvenile Justice Board; private charities that vigorously pursue programs of class socialization, integration, and confinement, sometimes working at the behest of the state; the police at their various levels (municipal, military, etc.); religious functionaries seeking various forms of ideological

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engagement in exchange for services provided; traffickers; pimps; slave-runners; parents. All these present various forceful mandates for hiding. 15 In this calculus (or constellation) of age, power, and place, personal names fix and assign, they threaten to confine and block mobility, and they locate, in what Matt Hull (2012) calls the ‘government of paper,’ albeit with a rather grand disorganization, and they further escape the sorts of conceptual and spatial slots to which children were newly assigned or confined with the advent of colonial blueprints of childhood in India in schools and elsewhere (see Sen 2005 and Balagopalan 2014). They do what Anderson (1992) observed of the census, the map, and the museum—they enumerate. Simultaneously, however, categorical names produce the possibility for solidarity, co- acknowledgment, some kind of protection in numbers, a sense of collective self through a naming of ‘what we are,’ and perhaps even a nascent notion of both subjection and resistance. So while in some ways solo children’s use of names comes down to a non-use of names, or a use of non-names, to escape the arresting gaze and grasp of discipline, the predations of forces that seek to fix, in others it underscores a denotation of categories that are never the terms of classification. 16 As flight and escape, particularly from untenable domestic situations, is itself at the very center of their stories of self, NGOs, government programs of ‘child rescue,’ and service-providing religious institutions are seen simply to replicate the uncomfortable confinement from which they ran and the common wisdom is thus to avoid them. As any agent in public space threatens to temper their mobility and freedom, and potentially to make their location known to forces they wish to evade, these runaways may use dozens of names. The names are not used in unpatterned ways, but rather they are situationally-contingent. A child may vary its name by location, or by occupational situation, or by the age or other category of their conversational partner. 17 This, then, lays out the contextual cartography for the children’s complex set of deeply situational naming strategies—both for themselves as individuals and for the category of person to which they see themselves belonging—as a component of anti-disciplinary strategies of evasion, dissimulation, and self-protection. In this widely-replicated mode of narrative praxis, iterated in similar ways throughout the Subcontinent (and beyond), personal names as deployed by ‘street children’ become fluid vehicles of strategic self- positioning to circumvent forms of power that seek to define, fix, and track the children.

The Physical Counterpart: Transi(en)t Space

18 This practice of nominal hiding and self-obfuscation corresponds to a wider tactic of actual, physical—indeed cartographic—hiding mounted by these children, for a microcosm of which I will let my narrative settle some on the railway stations in which they reside. The description of this process is a necessary counterpart to the assertion that counternymic evasion is part of a materially-iterated calculus (that must go beyond the semiotics of Deleuze and Guattari’s nomadisms), and can be rendered legible in space as well as in language. I describe this material evasion, in other words, because I believe it is part of a wider complex with—and has powerful counterparts in— the more intimate hidings of language and names that I describe.

19 The children’s living is indeed structured by the very notion of hiding. While in the interior of the edges of the stations they live in—and, in this case, of Hazrat

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Nizamuddin Railway Station—are the designated spaces of the proper and prescribed subjects (or agents) of railway space, including the Railway Protection Force, engineers, train operators, military security (present in force with machine guns) and other staff, children keep away from such legitimate compartmentalization (see again Bear 2007, Aguiar 2011). Even menial labor, whose portering work is formalized in stations, have their own designated location marked with a sign reading ‘Coolie Shelter.’7 Solo children, however, for whom there is nowhere they are explicitly allowed to be, or supposed to be, must forge of the station’s space transgressive zones in which they can move and subsist evasively. This legal and disciplinary conundrum is part of what requires resistance, or transforms just-living into resistance, and defiance of the sort that mounts a challenge to disciplinary spatialities. Everyone legitimate has a ‘proper place’; even the poorest laborers are legitimate. But for the few subjects who have no proper place, being anywhere is legible as the contestation of a space. To accord them a place in the station would be to acknowledge the legality of child labor and of the failure of welfare, to point to the perceived failures of a nation, and to highlight aesthetics that the city and the state, modern, corporate, Asian, and clean as they envision themselves, would rather not dignify with comment or deixis. It must be added that the praxis of hiding must be balanced rather carefully with a measured and intentional visibility, to be deployed for example when begging. 20 At Hazrat Nizamuddin Railway Station, the primary group with which I worked lived in a nearly-invisible spot between two inward-sloping segments of corrugated tin roofing that runs along the platform, and underneath the footbridge that spans the station, from whose lateral lattice it must be accessed. The group—all of whom had replacement names, often transecting and transcending communal boundaries—slept, ate, huffed, snuggled, and sorted in that location. Roof living is a favorite way to avoid police and hostile passengers. Jamshed, a grown runaway who at the time of my research worked for an NGO, recounts that his group lived for years in a spot of roofing in New Delhi Railway Station that they called, simply, ‘our place.’ Consider for ethnographic context Jamshed’s distinctive arrival narrative, in which he explains that he didn’t ‘come’ to Delhi. That would be too intentional a characterization. Here is how he recounts it: I was taken. I was with my friends. I was excited to see Delhi, to know new things. Delhi is different from the countryside, you know. People in my village always talked about how great Delhi was. So I said: I’m going. I did not come on my own. I had some friends, they had some railway tickets. They wanted to go for vacation, for eleven days. Come to Delhi, they said, Delhi is great, there are strange things there, there’s a lot of electricity there [i.e. ‘it is an electric sort of place’], so I became very excited. I came with my friends, and then they abandoned me [on the train]. I had no idea what Delhi was, I was totally senseless [i.e. ‘bewildered’]. So when the train stopped, some people said we’re getting to Delhi, it’s the last stop. And I got off. I saw how different everything was, what my nation is like. On my first night I slept on the platform. In the morning I met some other kids. I was hungry. I saw some of them eating. You see, they noticed me because I was well-dressed when I first came. And I lived in the station two years.8 21 I worked with a group in the same station that lived hidden beneath the stairs near the bathrooms on the Delhi Gate side. The primary living, waste-sorting and sleeping location for children in New Delhi Station (NDLS), however, is the so-called jali. A jali is

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a lattice or screen, but it also represents seclusion, secrecy, status, and purdah in Indo- Islamic architecture and literature, and is thus of great symbolic importance in collective imaginaries of space; it represents a certain cultural read of the station. This particular jali, however, happens to be a screen (or a grill) enclosing an electrical grid or substation (a high-voltage power supply, in fact, to feed overhead catenaries), but hiding the children, including, once, Petu—‘Tummyboy’—who was mangled and died beneath the Rajdhani Express; the children’s sleeping area was in the space between the screen and the grid it protected. Despite (my) safety concerns, it seemed to serve its role as a jali in the domestic and cultural sense, bestowing a degree of seclusion, separation, security, and privacy within its forbidding perimeters.

22 Beyond this compartmentalized officiality, and past the tracks’ edges, more secrecy: there lie the stations’ borderlands and shadow zones: dumps, scrubland, makeshift croplands, sewage swamps. At Hazrat Nizamuddin, this zone contains a vacant lot that is called ‘the Park.’ While lounging around the inside of an inactive train one afternoon with some eight or nine of the boys, who wanted a solvent-sniffing rest after some tiring scavenging, I asked, after a mention of someone who had gone to the Park, ‘what happens there?’ Raju, with whom I worked intensively at Nizamuddin, a Rajasthani runaway or orphan (who kept his story secret) who had himself changed his name to this (or, really, one similar to it) from a Muslim name (let’s say Irfan), looked away, and said, in a hushed voice, ‘sexy’ (i.e. sex). Perhaps over-reading his candor and comfort at the question I then later asked if he might repeat what he had said, to open it up for comment by the other boys, and for my research partner, Khushboo, to hear. But he declined, not surprisingly, and would not elaborate. 23 In such a way, it might suddenly dawn on us that the hiding place works not only for but also against the hiders, the children; on the one hand, it allows evasion, resistance, concealment. On the other hand, however, it allows others to hide their exploitive interactions with the children, to conceal what they do to them in the hiding places. What then would be the salience for the politics of pseudonymity? The same: where fluid names allow for a certain sorcery of self-obfuscation, they also work against the children in denying them any legal locatability: a child with many or no names, or conjured names, can be preyed upon with greater impunity, for the recourse they might seek is negated by their invisibility, their inability to exist, in a legal sense; in the absence of a name, there shall be no record of whatever is to be done to them by this- or-that petty tyrant—rape, enslavement, trafficking, forced begging—and the tyrant in question can sit comfortably with the knowledge that this child can barely be said to exist—certainly not sufficiently to mount a grievance or even to be found or to be heard from again if a threat (or worse) should be articulated. After all, s/he has given up the last claim on legal location, enumeration, existence: the name.

Of Vagabonds and Skeleton Children

24 The children’s own language, and in particular the terms they use to describe themselves and their peers, must rest at the heart of this reflection. Even ethnographers reinforce society’s indifference to children, their perception as non- citizens, as unformed beings, by forever consulting adults on the nature of society and space. But children are people of unique and varied perspective; if scholars insist that institutions and homes must take them seriously, so must they take seriously the idea

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of children as possessors of an unparalleled social vantage and an experience and interpretive toolkit like none other.

25 In North India, three primary terms for ‘street child’ are in daily circulation among the children and others: aawara, lawaaris and kangaal (sometimes in compound conjunction with baccha, ‘child,’ i.e. lawaaris baccha). The historical etymologies of these terms are captivating, given their referents and the contexts of their usage. In general, these terms, despite the more specific denotations suggested by their morphologies, are abstracted from situational type, so any of them might be used in equal measure for an orphan, a runaway, a street-working child with family nearby, or an abandoned child. 26 Of the three terms, only kangaal, for which Platt (1884) gives ‘poor,’ ‘wretched,’ ‘miserable,’ indigent,’ ‘beggarly,’ etc., appears to be of unambiguous Indic origin. Though mobilized by the children to describe themselves and others like them with relative frequency, it is also the most rarely used of the triad. Platt provides a historical derivation of Prakrit kankalo, ‘skull,’ and Sanskrit kangkala, ‘bone garland’9 or ‘skeleton’—implicitly denoting a form that is already dead or half-dead. Given their heightened susceptibility to death, much might be made of the application to street children of a term which ties them, as animate skeletons, to living death. Bone children. 27 The colloquial denotation of lawaaris, whose formal translation in Hindi is ‘unclaimed,’ is ‘orphan’ or ‘waif.’ The term’s compound derivation is from Arabic: la- ‘no’ + waaris (or waarith) ‘successor’: thus, fundamentally, ‘kinless’ (and at the end of a lineage). This again points poignantly to something fundamental in the calculus of child vagabondage: kinlessness. Kinlessness, alongside a complex relationship to family, figures prominently both into the empirical features of the life course of the children who eventually are assigned the ‘street child’ identity and into their perception by wider publics. Kinlessness is a core trope of runaway self-fashioning, and indeed it is a certain dialectic with kinship that renders the runaway socially and publicly legible as a certain category of person. 28 The third term, aawaara, is of uncertain origin, though the derivation is likely Persian. Platt (1884) gives ‘separated from one’s family; without house and home; wandering, roving; astray; abandoned, lost; dissolute’ and ‘vagabond.’ To try to discover more about the term’s origins, I surveyed some of the world’s leading Indo-Iranian historical linguists. Claus Zoller, Richard Frye, and Edmund Bosworth concurred with the Persian origin. Berkeley’s Martin Schwartz suggests ‘the word is unquestionably Persian,’ but of unclear etymology; Nicholas Sims-Williams says the same. Schwartz gives a meaning of ‘vagrant, displaced, exiled, outcast, mistreated.’ Eden Naby Frye points out that it is attested in modern Aramaic, writing: I am a native modern Aramaic speaker from Northwest Iran and aawaara was/is a common term in my vocabulary. It is definitely negative and ranges in meaning from astonished to confused. Oraham’s dictionary p. 12 col. b. defines the term as Wandering; a wanderer; a vagrant or listless person. I would use it thus: A danta’d chashmu shmidlun, pishle avaara. When his glasses broke, he became confused. Or, the children became wanderers, going from village to village when their parents died. 29 Christopher Brunner, further, points to the word’s emergence specifically in New Persian.10 Elizabeth Tucker, in her personal communication asked: ‘is there any chance that the word is awaara or awaaaraa with short initial a- ? […] If so, according to Turner,

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these words continue Sanskrit and Pali apaara- , Prakrit avaara- “boundless, without boundaries”.’

30 What is notable about the results of this playful little concordance on the long trajectory taken by the names the children use for themselves and each other is that they assign the children to timeworn, historically-circumscribed categories, categories that have clearly—along with their names and accompanying tropes—been around a long time. Indeed, though the criticism might be made that the children appear to know or comment very little on such matters, they in fact do: they joke on the meaning of names, reflect on their position in politics, the state, the world, ruminate on their abandonment by society, its meaning, its cruel ironies. It is not likely that the use of such terms to describe such children is new. Moreover, it is remarkable that the terms name features of these children’s lives that are basic, fundamental, and true elements of their stories and trajectories, and also of their social valency: vagrancy, vagabondage, mobility, mendicancy, the experience of being lost, abstraction and separation from kin, existence at the edge of society, proximity and susceptibility to death. The lexicon reveals a certain rootedness in cultural paradigms for such children. It is unclear why this is the case, or how it came to be, but reading into the implications of these names proves at the very least a window into the construction of emergent understandings of shared self.

No-Body: On the Somatics of Naming

31 There was, for a time, in the vicinity of Delhi’s Prachin Hanuman Mandir (the temple to the Monkey God near the Yamuna River), a twelve-year-old runaway whose name was Nabil. Of the street-dwellers of that quarter, many would know him, if you asked, but not by that name: he’s known only by Toonda, which denotes the arm he lost to a train that backed up on it. Excuse me, I once said, looking for him, is Nabil here? Nabil? You know, kid from Bangladesh, kid with only one arm? Ohh—Toonda. Yeah, he’s around. 32 Toonda, it seems, can mean ‘imbecile,’ ‘half-wit,’ or ‘idiot,’ though it can also mean (most famously in the case of the notorious militant bomb-maker Syed Abdul Karim, ‘Tunda’) handicapped or even ‘handless.’ Somehow, in the context of the first definition set, the missing arm, the bodily mutilation, renders Nabil a dunce; his bodily form is equated with a kind of intellectual handicap, which gives him a social stigma (but also prestige, cachet) he cannot shake. And yet, curiously, perhaps because it is intended ironically, he seems not to want to shake his nickname. It is a name that Nabil embraces; and it even occupies a peculiar place of pride at the center of his identity and sense of self.

33 When I met Nabil, in the winter of 2011, he was perhaps twelve. For a time he returned to his home in Bangladesh, where he broke it to his mother that he’d become, socially- speaking, a cripple, a task which he’d been dreading terribly. He returned to the street the following year a bigger boy, a full-fledged adolescent, but still not Nabil. 34 Not far away, in that same season, I came with my assistant, Khushboo, upon the mangled body of another runaway child, only nine or ten, who’d only minutes before died beneath a train. Flies swarmed and vultures circled above the tracks where his

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corpse laid, alongside his severed legs and feet. As we waited for the police to arrive to begin the mortuary process, we learned from the other railway children a bit more about this child, but we could not uncover his true name, for he was known only as Petu—Tummyboy. When this story at length wended its way into the courts and the press, he remained Petu. Later, when we learned his real name was (let’s say) Rahul, when we looked back at the photos of his body, we surmised his moniker had come from the long scar on his stomach. 35 Much earlier in the season, in January, we got wind of another child who’d just died, an ‘urchin’ of one of Delhi’s favorite homeless haunts, the Jama Masjid (Congregational Mosque), a boy who we later learned was possibly a son of an inhalant dealer. On a cold night, the tent he slept in was consumed in flames. Everyone got out but him. Residents said nothing remained but some smoldering bones. By morning, when we went to look at the site, nothing remained but ash. 36 There, someone said, pointing to the scorched ground, he was just there.

37 In this case, again, his true name could not be found. He was just Kaalu—Blackie—a commonly used nickname denoting dark skin.11 Indeed his real place- and kin- generated identity was so obscured that his entire naming was a feature of his phenotypic self, and we never learned his real name. 38 A city, then, surely among countless others, of street children known by bodies and not conventional names, by worn selves rather than kin matrices, which is what generate the former. For children whose identity is shaped by separation from kin and place, and who have no property, no dwelling, no documents and no school, the body emerges the sole available durable slate on which to fashion and display self. Is this too a resistance, a hiding? Perhaps. But perhaps this is something else, an erasure, a sad forgetting denoting a certain loss not only of limb but of self, an unidentifiability quite separate from what I observe above. In this domain, the embodied self seems to intimate a loss of some sort, a dissolution. 39 Sometimes it is the child that authors this embodied self, and sometimes it is an audience, a social milieu; in this case, correspondingly, the body emerges the most immediate field for the reading of self. And thus, in a field (a field indeed quite distant from Bourdieu’s (1985, 1986) field of embodied habitus) with little displayable or durable capital, what is worn on, revealed by, or achieved with a body becomes absolutely central to the construction of self and status. Where even names and biographies are fluid and contingent, body becomes itself a perduring site for spinning names and corresponding personhood narratives.

Effanineffable: Names and the Claim to Self

40 I want to suggest that at the most intimate level, the child unhitched from place and kin deploys names as a way to stake a claim to the ownership of her own story.

41 To wit: there was a boy who inhabited among the other homeless the park at the center of Delhi’s largest mosque, the Jama Masjid. All the other runaways knew him, and in his long career here he went in and out of multiple charities and homes many times. I was able to identify at least four separate major NGOs, each of which processes thousands of cases, in which he was known—and in each he had a different name, and each a different story. I knew the boy both as (let’s say) Akhil and, simultaneously (let’s say),

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Aziz. And I do note that the politics of the IRB requires me to perform my own dissimulation of names. As the story goes, Akhil ran away very young. As he told it, he was sold off multiple times, first to a tea seller, then a roadside snackmaker, who sold him off again, and so on, for a few hundred rupees each time. In some versions of Aziz- Akhil’s self, he originated in rural Bihar or Uttar Pradesh. In others, he’d come from within Delhi’s limits. He’d run away from each NGO he’d been sheltered by. A Hindu social worker at the NGO ‘Butterflies’ registered him as Akhil because she did not want to give him a Muslim name, and Akhil stuck as his sometimes-name. 42 Similar stories emerge all over the landscape of street-dwelling children: like that of a girl in New Delhi Railway Station I met, once, with at least four names, most of them carrying a sort of mythic texture—several of them indeed consorts of the Major Gods. And indeed children throughout India, and across South Asia, invariably dissimulate like this, at least initially. 43 Why is it that Akhil-Aziz does not want his true name known? What threat does that pose? Again we return to the essential geometry of names at the nexus of self, past, locatability, and power. Akhil-Aziz probably knows quite rightly that dissimulation and deception keeps him untrackable, unlocatable, and that his name and origin threaten to send him, well, home, or somewhere else where he can’t move as he wants. He does not wish to occupy registers and logs, does not care to be put in a home, does not want to be surveilled across the land, does not want to inhabit a line in Hull’s (2012) proverbial file. Wherever it is he comes from, Akhil-Aziz does not want to go back there. Wherever it is someone might take him, neither does he want to go there. 44 Perhaps, in terms derived from one of poetic motifs I’ve dwelt upon, from Deleuze and Guattari, Akhil-Aziz is practicing an active and very intentional narrative nomadics, a practice of non-fixity, of flexibility, of fluidity, of never being kept sur place, matched by a much more tangible, much more material practice of evasion and defiance, perhaps along the lines of the urban and spatial struggles Harvey (1985, for example) and Lefebvre (1975) propose—for children too, as invisible and voiceless subjects par excellence, are capable of mounting such resistances, and they should be seen to be so. In such ways names may be used to confound the power of the state and the authority of the city to arrest movement, to count, to achieve perfect surveillance. Remarkable, to think that in a world of potent rebels, smugglers, and movements, it is perhaps a set of barely-noticed children who might best disrupt regnant machineries and orders, and the normative ideologies upon which they rest. The ‘vagabond’ child, in the murky and inchoate space between actively-deployed collective names and actively-hidden personal names, blurs the categories that render a human being a subject of a certain type, and achieves an evasive resistance at the edge of the city’s powers, a shadow zone of kinless autonomy far from institutional walls in which selves may be reauthored and refashioned with some considerable freedom.

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NOTES

1. I place usually in parentheses because many ‘street children’ end up on the street because they are enslaved or ‘trafficked’ out of the village, and then run away from their traffickers; and though my central concern in this essay is with runaways who have made a choice to flee some unsuitable element of life in their villages, I also accommodate in this discussion the strategic use of names among their orphan, enslaved, and street-working cognates and comrades. 2. It is interesting in this sense to think of the re-named street child truly as a new incarnation, a newly fashioned self: the term avātara indeed is derived from the root tr/tar, which refers to crossing (downward, as in descent); these children have not crossed a boundary between physical lives (though many have come close), but rather a boundary between conceptual lives, a feature of which is certainly a true starting-over. 3. It is notable that the place called Banta and the district called Tata Nagar is now as it was already then in the state of Jharkhand, a mineral-rich, conflict-plagued administrative unit whose birth in 2000 was related in part to ‘adivasi’ and ‘tribal’ politics. 4. ‘Jhuggi’ denotes a thatch hut, tent, or temporary dwelling, generally inhabited by poor and itinerant classes. The child has also taken on the name of the temple that characterizes his village. 5. He uses the English word ‘death’ here, embedded in his Hindi. 6. NSF-BCS 0942506 7. See Prakash (1990) on coolies and bonded labor in and from India. 8. Curiously enough, this individual appeared globally in the news, including the BBC, some years later (2010–2011) as a kind of curiosity—in the context of his former street childhood—for having moved to Atlanta after marrying in his home village a Cuban-American woman he had met in Delhi on the NGO’s City-Walk tour. I am not able to ascertain whether or not he remains in the US. 9. As in, say the Manusmriti (56, Bhagavata Purana, xi. 5–11). Kapala-patra-nirata/Kangkala-malya- dharini. The ‘garland of bones’ is associated with , who in the text is described as ‘wearing a Brāhmanical thread composed of white snakes, clad in an elephant’s hide, with a necklace of beads, and a garland of skulls, riding upon Nandi, accompanied by , , spectres, witches, , sprites and evil spirits’ and elsewhere, in a smear by Daksha, as follows: ‘He roams about in dreadful , attended by hosts of ghosts and sprites, like a madman, naked, with

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dishevelled hair, wearing a garland of dead men’s [skulls] and ornaments of human bones’ (as in Wilkins 1882). 10. Brunner, in a personal communication, further writes: ‘The Persian word āwāra (Tehran: āvāre) is certainly common in Iran. It is already in early New Persian, in the Shahnama of Ferdowsi (‘lost, in flight, vagabond,’ Fritz Wolff, Glossary..., pp. 35–36). Both āwār and āwāra occur in medieval literature (examples in Dekkhoda, Loghatnāma, fascicle Ā—Abu Saʿd, Tehran, 1946, pp. 196–97). I don’t recall it in Pahlavi or Manichean Middle Persian, and it is not in Durkin- Meisterernst’s dictionary. Although I don’t have an etymology, for the morphology, cf. Mid/New Pers. āwāz ‘voice,’ āwām ‘time period,’ Pahl. and Jewish Persian āwādag ‘generation’ (according to Mackenzie, Dict. of Pahlavi, p. 13). Confusingly (or, for a poet, pleasingly) similar is wīrān (Pahlavi awērān) ‘ruined, destroyed’—a meaning given by Dehkhoda for some examples.’ 11. In India, where, for example, skin-whitening creams are marketed to dark-skinned women, and lighter pigments are often highly valued, skin-color acquires its meanings in a fraught calculus obliquely complicated by pre-modern histories of the Indo-Iranian interaction with the autochthonous groups that were eventually identified with the mlechha and impure castes, by colonial-era significations of white skin, and by the global circulation of images equating whiteness with wealth and prestige. All these blurry historical formations of phenotype may be then further consciously deployed by various interested parties.

ABSTRACTS

In India, child runaways inhabiting urban space mobilize a complex set of naming strategies— both for themselves as individuals and for the category of person to which they see themselves belonging—as a component of strategies of evasion, dissimulation, and self-protection. In this widely-replicated mode of narrative praxis, iterated in similar ways throughout the Subcontinent (and beyond), personal names as deployed by ‘street children’ become fluid vehicles of strategic self-positioning to circumvent forms of power that seek to define, fix, and track the children. As any agent in public space threatens to temper their mobility and freedom, and potentially to make their location known to forces they wish to evade, these runaways may use dozens of names. The names are not used in unpatterned ways, but rather they are situationally- contingent.

INDEX

Keywords: India, street children, runaways, cities, Delhi, postcoloniality

AUTHOR

JONAH STEINBERG

Associate Professor of Anthropology, University of Vermont

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To Be Some Other Name: The Naming Games that Hijras Play

Vaibhav Saria

1 Although the hijras appear as a generic category in much official and scholarly discourse that renders them as the ‘third gender,’ members of these communities themselves pay close attention to the multiple criteria through which one hijra body might be distinguished from another.1 This kind of differentiation is reiterated in common talk among the hijras and relates to the moral economy of izzat,2 or honor. Of the multiple signs through which hijras make their bodies and their sexuality apparent in both the public domain and in interpersonal relations, proper names play a significant role in marking the place of the hijras in the wider sexual economy and also for indexing the changes in the status of a particular person through the life course. From the outside, it might appear that the boundaries of the hijra community are well- defined but from the inside, the community is haunted by questions about who is an asli (real/true) hijra and who might be a nakli or false one (false in the sense of an impostor or a duplicate which carries with it a moral charge of cheating). Distinctions are made through reading very closely the multiple alterations of bodies through surgical and medical interventions, the movement between names, and the volatility of relations in which different sub-communities of hijras are implicated, for differentiating hijra bodies and selves. In this volatile play of who one is, questions about asli and nakli are not simply about social identities but about one’s existence as genuine or fake.

2 This paper is based on ethnographic fieldwork I conducted between 2008 and 2010 intermittently and then without any break for a further period between 2011 and 2013 amongst hijra groups in three rural districts of Orissa—Bhadrak, Jajpur, and Kalahandi. Before my fieldwork in Orissa, I belonged to the community of sexual minorities in Calcutta that organized various public events demanding recognition from the state. This is how I first came to register the mutual suspicion among hijras about who is a true hijra. For instance, Shonali, a hijra guru in Bhadrak, did not consider the other hijras of Bhadrak asli (genuine) because they were married to women, 3 while hijras in Jajpur did not consider any of the hijras of the Bhadrak, including Shonali, asli because,

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while they were organized as a household, they were not members of one of the recognized hijra gharanas (lineages).4 Meanwhile, the hijras of Calcutta did not consider any of the hijras from Orissa asli because they earned their living by begging on trains instead of through more respectable activities such as offering their blessings at auspicious occasions such as and childbirth. Also of acute importance in these contestations over asli/nakli hijras was the state of a hijra’s genitalia. Certain hijras who had gone through the ritual of castration, called nirvan hijras, did not consider those who had not to be asli hijras, or even hijras at all, dismissing them as kothis (effeminate men) or in moments of high tension and conflict as gandus (sodomites).5 Furthermore, hijras who were congenitally third gender often claimed that they alone were asli hijras. Differences between different kinds of thirdness were also marked through participation in regional traditions of theatre and performance: jankhas, jogtas and bhands (actors who impersonate women) were differentiated from asli hijras or absorbed into the category depending upon context (Cohen 1995, Nanda 1999, Pament 2013). Historically, it was this overlap between hijras and participants in various regional traditions of performance that prompted the colonial policing of the hijra in public spaces but also resulted in hijras devising tactics and strategies to evade such policing such as wearing female clothing only in areas beyond British rule or in the privacy of their homes (Hinchy 2014). Furthermore, globalizing discourses on sex and gender lead to the increasing vernacularization of categories such as ‘Men who have sex with men’ (Boellestorff 2011) and ‘transgender,’ thus making any neat categorization of the ‘third gender’ impossible. These complex forces lead us to ask what work the asli-nakli dynamic performs and how proper names are drawn into it?

Ritual and play

3 While there is some mention in earlier ethnographies of hijra practices of name changing (from the male name given at birth to a female one) they have not received sustained attention. In addition to describing traditional practices of naming I seek here to extend the discussion by examining how hijras encounter the state and judiciary through the names they bear and how definitions of asliness and nakliness arise and dissolve in these sites.

4 A hijra’s decision to join a hijra household as a disciple [cela] to a guru culminates in the ritual of putting rit in that particular household under that guru and it is through this ritual that celas establish their kinship with their gurus. Part of the ritual is to ask the initiate what she would want as her new name. This change in name consolidates the asliness of a hijra and transforms her relation to the local moral world around her as an ascetic because in addition to moving away from her natal village to live with a hijra community elsewhere, usually in a city, the hijra also gives up her surname and consequently her gotra and caste (Nanda 1992: 33–52). While this is the most important instance of the changing of names, it is not the only one in a hijra’s life. Hijras also change their names as they switch from one guru to another, or from one hijra household to another due to an altercation with the guru. For example, Kalavati, a senior cela (disciple) of a hijra guru in Jajpur, was thrown out of the hijra household there in the following manner. Her cela, a hijra named Sandhya, had fallen in love with a man who was already in a relationship with another cela of the same

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household, Chandni. Sandhya seduced the young man and embarked on an affair, which led to him eventually leaving Chandni for her. A fight quickly ensued between the two hijras over the young man after Sandhya’s affair and betrayal of her fellow cela was discovered. Since Sandhya and Chandni lived in the same house with Guruma (the guru) and nine of her other celas and nati-celas, 6 including Kalavati, the household was quickly divided with each hijra aligning herself with either Sandhya or Chandni. Guruma, in order to broker some peace, had penalized Sandhya for seducing her fellow cela’s partner but had not commented on whether she would allow Sandhya to continue her relationship. Later in the week, Kalavati not only encouraged Sandhya to get married to her lover but also took them to the marriage registrar where she signed the marriage certificate as a witness. When this came to light, another fight ensued and Guruma, now even more enraged, saw fit to penalize Kalavati as well for instigating the affair. Kalavati promptly ran away to Bhadrak (my field site) in the middle of the night and asked for shelter and protection from Shonali, the hijra guru in Bhadrak. Shonali took on Kalavati as a cela and after undergoing the ritual of rit; she was given a new name—Kaajal. Another instance of changing names following a dispute took place during my fieldwork when , a young hijra from Bhadrak, left her guru Priya, with whom she had lived in the neighboring district of Jalasore, and returned to her natal home. I greeted her and asked her how she was doing, addressing her by the name Lakshmi, as she had been known. She did not respond and after a few minutes said, ‘Lakshmi died, she was Priya’s cela. I am Madhabi.’ 5 I read this changing of names as ritualized games that hijras play. By ‘ritualized’ I mean to emphasize that names were not changed on a whim but carried the structural features of transitions that mark a change in the hijra’s status and were accompanied by rituals that facilitated such change. By characterizing these as ‘games’ I wish to indicate the register of the subjunctive that often meets its limits in the actual in the sense that the previous name continues to cling to the hijra, defining obligations that she was trying to escape. I noted in many cases that in spite of the name changing rituals they underwent, hijras could not simply shed the pasts in which their earlier names were implicated.7 While the renaming might have allowed a hijra to temporarily walk away from the fights, conversations, and the form of non-biological kinship that hijras practice, it did not generate a completely new person. In Madhabi’s case, she could not become Priya’s cela again even with a new name, despite her ardent wish to do so. While Lakshmi signaled the break from Priya by taking a new name, neither Priya nor the community could erase the memory of the wounding fight that had led to the severing of relations between her guru and her previous self. In later conversations with me, Priya would often use the name Lakshmi and not Madhabi as she cursed her, using abusive language about her as if the new name and the person bearing that name did not exist for her. Similarly, Kalavati’s new name did not mean that she could escape the fine and punishment that was meted out to her by her former guru. She was caught by the hijras of Jajpur and brought back to undergo the humiliating ritual of expulsion that would strip her of her membership from that household. This rite involved returning the tweezers, called darsan, that hijra celas are given by their guru, paying an exorbitant fine, and finally undergoing the humiliating rite called thuk ke chatna in which the cela is required to spit on the hijra guru’s feet and forced to lick them clean. It was only after begging forgiveness and undergoing this ritual that she was allowed to return to Bhadrak to her new guru as Kaajal.

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6 The analogy between ritual and play has been used by scholars to show the ‘as if’ character of ritual enactments. Seligman et al. (2008: 20) propose that we understand ‘ritual as a subjunctive—the creation of an order as if it were truly the case.’ They further argue that though ‘the subjunctive world created by ritual is always doomed ultimately to fail’ because it ‘can never fully replace the broken world of experience,’ the practice of rituals not only gives us temporary respite from this brokenness but also equips us to deal with them (Seligman et al. 2008: 31). Building on this insight I want to argue that the changing of names also has an as-if character in that it reveals a particular modality—that of playfulness as the mode in which one engages one’s past. The new names of hijras enacted an ‘as if’ self—one that could be completely severed from its past, but like the subjunctive in rituals, these names, too, failed to accomplish a complete break from the past in the face of the real world. Kalavati and Priya could not escape humiliation and punishment at the hands of their gurus. However, the ultimate failure of ritual games—the hardness of the real as it hits against the wishful construction of new identities—came to the fore most forcefully in accusative discourses of asli-nakli when hijras had to confront the institutions of the state. As we shall see below, the male names of hijras persisted and resurfaced in such moments leaving them vulnerable to accusations of being nakli while also reminding them of their erstwhile male names and what they constituted and entailed.

The names I was called

7 In recent years there has been a concerted effort on the part of both national and state level government to include hijras in its various schemes addressing poverty, inequality and corruption. This is evident in the attempt to include hijras in the 2011 census of India, and in schemes such as the Unique Identification Number, through provision of a box labeled ‘other’ alongside ‘male’ and ‘female.’ This box labeled ‘other’ for the hijra to mark is duplicated across various sites of the state from identification cards to—most recently—passports. These efforts to render the hijra commensurable with the state culminated in the 2012 landmark case of National Legal Services Authority vs the Union of India, which recognized third gender citizens and granted them equal fundamental rights (writ petition (civil) no. 400 of 2012). Yet these efforts towards commensurability paradoxically create conditions ripe for the enactment of violence on and violation of the hijra body.

8 The state’s efforts to provide its services to the hijra conjoin with the logic of rendering them as a population to be documented and enumerated through technologies of governmentality. But these efforts to bring hijras under the governmental gaze come up against the fact that hijras change their names multiple times. Since various officials, both from state institutions such as the DAPCU (District AIDS Prevention Control Unit) and NGOs who run programs related to prevention and treatment of HIV and AIDS, assume that the female names taken by hijras are not stable they assign the male names that the hijras were given at birth on official documents as proof of identity. This created a new set of problems that I witnessed during my fieldwork. For instance, since hijras were recruited as local experts for HIV prevention, they were required to travel to various places and needed government issued documents to prove identity. A prominent NGO in Bhadrak arranged for identification papers for the hijras, but the documents carried the male names given to them at birth. In one instance, the

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male name created an embarrassing situation for Lovely, for even if she travelled in male clothes she had already modified her body through the use of hormones to the extent that she would not, at first glance, be identified as a man. She was forced to confess to the official at the airport that she was a hijra and had to endure the humiliating staring, whispering and giggling that ensued amongst various airport officials. Another transgendered person told me, Since all my documents are in my male name, I stood in the security line for male people but then the guard screamed, ‘Madam this is for men, your line is over there.’ It is so embarrassing; people stare at you, wondering what is happening. They begin whispering, everybody’s attention is on you. Now I always go to the female line and there when I am in the booth, I tell the lady. ‘I am like this, you tell me what to do, should I go to that line or stay here.’ Usually, the lady officer just says, ‘No problem, arre you look just like a woman.’ 9 Hijras in Bhadrak and Jajpur usually travel on trains and in groups. Given that begging in trains is common among hijras in Orissa, they were well known to railway officials and conductors. This familiarity did not always prevent violence, thus, hijras were always prepared for some altercation. This preparedness was usually signaled by the way hijras announced themselves in the trains; by their loud claps that served as identification enough. In other spaces that required state documentation, such as airports, the male names on official documents spelt trouble since the names (male) and the looks (female) did not match. The disjuncture evoked the suspicion of something clandestine: were their names and documents asli or nakli—real or forged? Let me provide one more example of how the asli-nakli dynamic became linked with the male names of hijras. When the officials collecting data for the 2011 census reached the districts of Jajpur, they insisted on recording the male names of the hijras who lived in one of the hijra households. A hijra who worked as a school teacher in her village before joining the Jajpur household told me, ‘I read in the newspaper that there was an option for ‘other’ in the census, so I asked the man why he was marking us as ‘male’ instead of using the option of recording us as hijras.’ The man told her, ‘oh, hijras are men.’ In the ensuing argument the official demanded to see whether they were castrated as proof of their being hijras. Since a lot of the young hijras had not undergone the ritual of castration, they were made to feel ashamed and ended up being counted as males. Recently hijras have begun to respond to these pressures for a stable name by using the word Kinnar as their last name, which, as I mentioned above, they have to give up when taking a hijra name. However, since local officials hold on to certain ideas of asli and nakli as this example demonstrates, hijras mostly end up using the male name for official purposes.8

10 The resurgence of the hijras’ male names not only rehearses the limits under which the state’s imagination of the hijra and her body function, but also indexes a suspicion of criminality. I proceed now to (re)assemble a number of recent court cases in which hijras were implicated in crimes of murder and bodily harm against either other hijras or against clients and lovers.

The hijra and the hands of justice

11 My interest in the presence of the hijra in the legal archive began when Shamsheri, a hijra in Bhadrak, showed me certain legal documents relating to her divorce from her wife. Shamsheri had been convinced by her elder brother to take on his mistress as her

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wife. The marriage was a ruse to provide cover for the mistress’s pregnancy resulting from her clandestine relations with Shamsheri’s already married brother. Shamsheri was willing to do this favor for her brother who wished to continue the relationship with his mistress. This amicable arrangement between the brothers and the mistress quickly soured when the elder brother wanted to end the relationship. The document Shamsheri showed me was an order sheet issued by the Judicial Magistrate of First Class, which is the second lowest criminal court in India. The order sheet had the pronouncement that Shamsheri had to pay 1500 rupees as maintenance to her wife. The issue of maintenance had been brought under the criminal court because Shamsheri’s wife, wishing to avenge herself on her former lover, had charged Shamsheri with domestic violence, a criminal offense under section 498 of the Indian Penal Code. In addition, Shamsheri was accused of making demands for dowry, which once again was a criminal offense. Nowhere in the documents was Shamsheri identified as a hijra. Her male name was used for the entire proceeding and gave the impression that it was a case of a man who allegedly tortured his wife for dowry, beat her and threatened to abandon her to a life of destitution if she left him. While this might be an instance of the law refusing to recognize Shamsheri as a hijra because she was married to a woman, it raises questions pertinent to the cases I cite below which indicate different patterns in the use of male or hijra names depending on whether the hijra stands before the court as an accused or as a victim or witness of crime.

12 Pratiksha Baxi, in her recent work on the juridical construction of rape, argues that ‘juridical categories, incommensurable with the survivor’s experience, deployed during the rape trial, convert rape into sex and sex into rape’ (Baxi 2014: 346). The court, Baxi shows, relies on a certain set of fictions of the body and persons to judge whether the victim was raped or not. Any deviation from a certain recognized narrative of violence offered in the process of adjudication creates doubt on the claim of rape resulting in high rates of acquittal. In other words, if the story of the rape does not accord with the preconceptions of what a rape victim’s behavior must be like, then the courts are likely to conclude that the sex was consensual and the woman faked the story of rape to cover up consensual sex. I want to extend this argument in order to ask how the court adjudicates the asliness and nakliness of hijras as a way of establishing criminality and its implications. 13 A survey of the reported appellate judgments that deal with hijras reveals an intriguing pattern in the circulation of their male and female names. Since only the judgments of high courts and the Supreme Court are reported, and even then only upon the judge’s recommendation, it is not surprising that most of the cases in which hijras appear as the accused deal with a serious criminal offence, such as murder. Apart from reported judgments, the High Court also hears appeals to judgments that were delivered by lower courts, so we also have access to part of the legal proceedings in the appellate courts that become archived in the public record. A brief survey of these documents reveals how the law imagines the relation between naming and the body. Otherwise stated, the question is, how do courts name identity and locate criminality in the name?9 14 Take the case of Mantori @ Noor Mohd. vs State (MANU/DE/1525/2009) in which the hijras named Mantori and Bijli were held guilty of the murder of another hijra named . While Mantori and Bijli have their male names, Noor Mohammod and Laccho, respectively, recorded, Rekha’s male name is not given. The facts of the case were that

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in 1989, Rekha, who was a disciple of Bijli, was murdered by Mantori and her guru. The body was discovered in a jungle near the Idgah Mehrauli in Delhi by a patrolling chowkidar. The document is striking because of the pattern in which it names people who were involved in the crime. The male names of Mantori and Bijli are affixed like aliases in the document, but several other hijras, like the victim, Rekha, or the witnesses Meena and Anita, do not have their male names recorded. Whilst recording the multiple names of a person might be part and parcel of legal proceedings that must identify a criminal, the male names of hijras are not aliases—they are actively suppressed by hijras themselves because it is precisely leaving that name behind that is part of their transformation into a hijra. 15 We see how legal documents record the male names of hijras in ways, which suggest they are equivalent to each other, like aliases, in several other cases. Thus, in the case of Shabbir @ Neha vs State Govt. of NCT of Delhi (MANU/DE/3909/2012), Neha and a fellow hijra, identified in the document as Om Prakash also known as Helen, are accused of killing their customer Atiq in Woodland Park. The difference between a hijra and a man is erased by linking the excised male name as alias with the female name to generate a suspicion of nakliness that is confirmed by their criminality. This erasure is achieved by mentioning the male name of the hijra as if it had a bearing on the case. In the case ‘Vijay urf Rupa Kinnar versus the state of Allahabad’ (Criminal Misc. Bail Application No. 2156 of 2010 (2010) H.C. Allahabad), Rupa and her friend Manbhari (identified in the document with an alias—Akbar) were accused of killing an unnamed hijra. A witness, Jodh Singh, saw them carry the dead body at midnight. We can tell that the court recognized the persons concerned as hijras because the Additional Government Advocate had ‘argued that the applicants had motive for committing the crime, as there was some monetary dispute between the parties, who were eunuchs.’ The linking of the male names with female names, even when recognizing the persons concerned in the case as hijras, implies a relationship between criminality and maleness, which would raise doubts of asliness. 16 We can see this implication in the case Kashmira @ Salim vs. State (Delhi High Court, Criminal Appeal No. 725/2005) in which Kashmira is accused and later convicted of murdering a certain Daya Ram. I find it interesting that the court found it necessary to record that ‘Kashmira used to dress up as female and claimed that she was the wife of Daya Ram.’ Given that hijras are expected to dress in female attire and have husbands, such specific mention of Kashmira’s propensity to do just that, makes her hijraness nakli and reduces the facts of her existence to a spurious claim or disguise. While none of the documents show a conscious intention on the part of the law to render hijra criminals nakli, the circulation of her male name as an alias signals towards her nakliness because they refigure the hijra as a male who is in the guise of a female rather than a hijra with a female name. 17 It is not that hijras do not or cannot have male names—demanding that the hijra have a female name would replicate calls for asliness and denunciations of nakliness. Since hijra identities and bodies change slowly over time, pill by pill, and through decisions both big and small that range from the sartorial to the familial, it is quite possible that the hijra has different names and different genders in different documents. She may have a male name and gender recorded on her birth certificate but a female name and gender on her bank account documents, while being marked ‘other’ on her passport and Aadhaar card.10 The fact that the male name of the hijra is recorded only to impute

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a cause to her criminality renders the male name as evidential rather than incidental to a hijra’s life. 18 The attribution of a male identity to the criminal seems to accord with the judicial presumption that criminality is more ‘natural to the male’ than the female as argued by Veena Das (1996) in her study of rape trials in India. Das remarks that ‘in the process of judicial verification, courts construct the category of young males, who are acting out their impulses and ‘irrepressible sexual urges’ when they rape women’ (2420). If the law mitigates the violence committed by young men by naturalizing their sexuality then could we also argue that the law in the cases cited above adheres to a gendered etiology of violence? By citing the male names of hijras it adheres to a conceptualization of maleness that is defined by its propensity towards violence. By discounting intentionality, I am relying on the notion of the ‘juridical unconscious’ as put forward by Felman (2002: 57), who writes that ‘Legal memory is constituted, in effect, not just by the ‘chain of law’ and by the conscious repetition of precedents but also by a forgotten chain of cultural wounds and by compulsive or unconscious legal repetitions of traumatic, wounding legal cases.’ I want to invoke this unawareness that the law has regarding itself in order to understand its underlying commitment to sex and biology that renders them true and everything else derivative and virtual. I shall return to this point in the next section. 19 The maleness of the hijra that is unconsciously implied through the use of her male name as a criminal alias is further thrown into relief when we see that hijras are allowed to keep their hijra names only in instances when they are dead or when they are not accused of crimes. So for example, in the case of State vs Shree aka Mani Gopal (MANU/DE/1918/2009), Neelam, a single-named hijra who was a witness to the murder of another single-named hijra called Zareena, is shot dead by the multiply-named criminal Shree Gopal aka Mani. Thus, it cannot be that it is usual procedure to collect the male names of hijras to ensure their asliness. It could be argued that given that the male names of hijras are actively suppressed it would be impossible to discover and record them in the case of their death if their family members could not be tracked. We do not see police recording the male names of hijras who are alive and are witnesses to crime either—but surely there is a stake in verifying the identity of victims and witnesses? Even where the male name of the hijra can be recorded because of access to family members it is not if her criminality is not at stake. For instance, in the case Babu Lal vs the State (Rajasthan High Court, Criminal Appeal no. 870/2005), a woman named Ratni Devi is killed by one of her sons, either Ramesh or Babu Lal aka Pappu. The hijra offspring called Susheela is a witness in the case and while her family members might easily have provided her male name, it is not recorded.

The hijra’s penis

20 Let me turn now to how the law qualifies the nakliness of the hijra criminal by consolidating her male name through sex and biology. Given that the popular definition and understanding of hijras reduces them to their castrated status, it is possible that police officers when reporting the hijra murderers had insisted on checking whether the hijra criminal was castrated or not and that the male name of the hijra was attached to the criminal upon finding them uncastrated. This form of harassment is routine even when there is no crime committed. For example, during my

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fieldwork in the rural districts of Orissa, I found that the police would regularly patrol the spots where hijras solicit customers and force them to remove their clothes. Upon finding them (still) uncastrated, they would be taken to the police station and threatened with being put in jail. The hijras would plead for mercy and pay a bribe to be set free.11 I note that none of the court documents that I have cited mention whether the hijra was castrated or not. Thus, the effect of maleness was produced here primarily through language or, more specifically, by the interpellation of the hijra by her male name. The implication of biology through language is clearly seen in the case Kumkum vs State (Delhi High Court, Criminal Revision Petition 414/2010). The judgment upheld the sentence of imprisonment for one year, meted out because Kumkum was caught begging and booked under the Bombay Prevention of Begging Act, 1959. Throughout the petition Kumkum was called a ‘male hizara (sic),’ which I take to mean that she was not castrated.

21 Let me further illustrate how the biology and sex of hijras is produced in the context of law and criminality. Pravallika, a hijra, was murdered on January 17, 2015, in Hyderabad. While reports of this murder were carried by many English language dailies, the details of the case that emerged later were only reported via online NGO networks and statements released by the Telangana Hijra Transgender Samiti (THTS). The statement went as follows: On the evening of Tuesday, 20th January 2015 i.e. yesterday, our friend, a Hijra sex worker was taken away for interrogation to the KPHB police station. She is a colleague and friend of the late Pravallika and us. On the pretext of interrogation, the police blamed her for conspiring to murder Pravallika and resorted to sub- human methods. The police caught her while she was returning home from her hot spot and confiscated her mobile first to ensure that she couldn’t contact anyone for help. The police had themselves urged her in our presence at the Gandhi hospital mortuary to continue going to the hot spot. We were a minimum of 20 who witnessed this request from the police. They said that they suspected that Pravallika may have been murdered by her clients and hence wanted to use our Hijra friend as a bait and a decoy. Despite this, she was treated like a criminal, DENUDED by policemen with the alleged reason of ‘checking whether or not she was really a transwoman.’ She had to remain nude for 4–5 hours as they manhandled and tortured her, questioning her transidentity all through, as she was uncastrated. She told them that transidentity cannot and should not be restricted to a person body or be reduced to one’s anatomy as enshrined in the NALSA judgement but the police demonstrated total disregard for the NALSA vs. UOI judgement of the Supreme court. Naked as she was in the biting cold of a wintry night, she pleaded for her clothes but they couldn’t care. Finally, with no other option left, she was constrained to reveal her HIV+ve status and explain that she is highly vulnerable to infections and that she can’t afford to be nude for so long in such cold weather. Sadly, that too fell on deaf ears. This only resulted in them keeping a safe distance from her having masked their noses and mouths but they didn’t return her clothes to her. Our sister transgender is very ill now and struggling the consequences of this torture. Pravallika’s mobile is now on surveillance after her death. Preliminary investigations revealed that some police personnel were in touch with her before her murder. They claimed to be ‘just her friends.’ It is nothing new that the policemen who harass and torture Hijra people often seek free sexual favors from them and call themselves just their friends when found in such compromising situations. With this coming to light and the unusual urgency shown by the police to paint this case as an ‘intra-hijra feud leading to Pravallika’s murder,’ the very role of the police appears suspect and perhaps complicit in this crime.

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As much as we would like to and wish to, we ARE NOT ABLE TO TRUST the police anymore and demand that the following at the earliest: 1. Judicial enquiry for a free, fair and transparent investigation of Pravallika’s murder 2. Release of the post mortem report and FIR 3. Speedy implementation of the NALSA judgement The statement made by the THTS shows us how the biology of the hijra can be conjured up to fit the asli-nakli dynamic and consequently be used to locate violence. Pravallika’s asliness goes unquestioned when it can easily be argued that perhaps her nakliness was the reason for her murder, especially if it was an ‘intra-hijra feud’—violence between hijra groups sometimes pivot around accusations of nakliness. The tortured hijra’s penis not only becomes evidence for her nakliness but is also taken as evidence for a propensity towards violence. The penis is made to appear when criminality needs to be proven, though it disappears in the context of intimacy and sexual transactions. For instance, in the context of sexual interest, men would often refer to the hijra’s anatomy explicitly as female; they would talk about her breasts, her vagina and her capacity to give birth. The protocols of flirting would never allow for enquiring after the presence or absence of the hijra’s penis.12 22 The appearance of the hijra penis in contexts of murder and disappearance in contexts of sexual transactions between ‘friends’ implies that there is a critical distance between the penis and the phallus and that a change in context allows the former to become the latter. It is helpful here to return to Butler’s (2002) emphasis on the distance as well as the relationship between the phallus and the penis. As is well known, Butler argues that ‘the law is not simply a cultural imposition on an otherwise natural heterogeneity; the law requires conformity to its own notion of ‘nature’ and gains its legitimacy through the binary and asymmetrical naturalization of bodies in which the Phallus, though clearly not identical with the penis, nevertheless deploys the penis as its naturalized instrument and sign’ (2002: 135). The hijra’s penis only appeared as a phallus when legal contexts demanded a signification of violence, which in the cases described above was murder, and was achieved through male names. Such signification marks the presupposition of maleness and its inherent propensity towards violence. The penis is evacuated of the symbolic phallus when intimacy and/or sexual transactions are the orders of the moment. Let me explain this further.

23 Leo Bersani in his article on Almodovar’s film All About my Mother calls attention to the presence of the penis on the bodies of several transsexuals in order to ask whether these penises constitute the paternal phallus or conversely should be seen as contesting the symbolic. He studies the scene in which several women, with and without penises, are talking about the penis and ‘make it an object of fun, not exactly something to be made fun of, but rather something to have fun with’ (2010: 77). Bersani offers the provocation that, ‘Unlike the absent father and the fantasmatic phallus, the Almodovarian penis is present even where, in principle, it should not be: on the bodies of such (at least self-proclaimed) women as Agrado and Lola. The penis’s many reoccurrences help to dephallicize it’ (Bersani 2010: 77–8). If the penis can be dephallicized even in its occurrence, that is to say if it can exist without symbolizing power and authority, then the question that can be posed from the gendered reporting of violence committed by and on hijra bodies is this: what does law achieve by reading the physiological penis as the symbolic phallus or by equating the penis with maleness and in turn with criminality?

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24 It seems to me that the hijra penis, when accused of murder and in turn of nakliness, enables the courts to arrive at an association between maleness and murder. This association brings forth a confrontation in which psychoanalysis throws into sharp relief the problem of law’s epistemological foundation. While the Oedipal tragedy makes ‘visible the unconscious foundation of the symbolic life,’ law grapples precisely with the problem of ‘representing the question of tragedy, the ancient discourse of destiny summoning Oedipus’ (Legendre 1998: 178–86). Let me first anchor the pertinence of the Oedipal drama in order to understand the asli-nakli dynamic that I have shown pervades not just hijra aspirations for authenticity but other social processes as well, such as the legal understanding of violence. 25 In the South Asian case, Robert Goldman contests the absence of the Oedipal tragedy in Sanskrit epics and writes, For it is my strong feeling that in exclusively relying upon the manifest or stated relationships in many important episodes, scholars have tended to overlook the very marked tendency in some types of Oedipal story towards the substitution of various male figures, notably the guru or aged brahman sage, and to a much lesser extent the elder brother, for the father and female figures such as the guru’s wife, the sister-in-law, and often a cow, for the mother (1978: 327). He further reminds us of the legitimacy of substitution by remarking that, It was in fact the recognition of such substitutions that led Freud to his most fundamental discoveries about the operation of the unconsciousness and therefore about the science of psychoanalysis itself. For it was his realization that the figures of friends, colleagues, etc. in his dreams and those of his patients were in fact representations of parental and other important figures that enabled him to produce The Interpretation of Dreams (Goldman 1978: 367 n. 16). It is thus only by substituting actual fathers for father figures, more specifically the brother, that we can see the epics and as tales of Oedipal violence and tragedy. Let us return to Legendre’s provocation that psychoanalysis renders impossible a legal rendition of tragedy. We can see how the hijra criminal results in an analogous dilemma. If the hijra is expected to be asocial, an ascetic who has walked away from the duties of the householder, forsaken the oedipal tragedy and its promising futurity, then how is her criminality to be understood in terms other than nakliness given that her asliness is defined by her incorruptibility?13 Legendre writes that ‘It is in light of a textual arrangement of spacing necessary for the life of a representation, for the reproduction of the animal that speaks, that the function of reference may be apprehended as a logical function of society. Such a function has as its task to put into play, in the unconscious representations of the subject, the power to institute separation by words. We are concerned with the essence of the symbolic function’ (181–2). The essence of the phallus with which the court cases and police reports imbue and refer to the hijra penis not only consolidates a certain idea of maleness but also configures the hijra within a normative oedipal development and thus render her nakli.

The incorruptibility of the asli hijra

26 The figure of the hijra politician serves as the perfect foil for the hijra criminal because, if the latter is made nakli because of her criminality, the former is mimetically constituted as incorruptible and hence asli. Hijra politicians never stand on their male names. They are not only made famous through their female names but their hijraness

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and consequently their incorruptibility depends on those names and on the breaking from one set of obligations signified by the male name and the taking on of another through female ones such as Shabnam Mausi, Asha Devi, Manisha Aai, and most recently Kinnar, the elected mayor of Raigarh. Apart from such well- documented and spectacular instances of hijras attaining political offices, many more local instances were visible in rural Orissa. During the course of my fieldwork I was taken to meet a hijra in her mid fifties who had won elections at the block level. While in our brief conversation she emphasized that she was elected because people knew she was honest and hard-working, the government officer who had taken me to meet her rehearsed the logic that it was because she could not have a family that she was incorruptible. Similarly, Jaina and Azgari, who were the oldest and senior most hijras in Bhadrak were often called upon to sit on local neighborhood committees that oversee the management of funds collected for local celebrations, precisely because of their purported incorruptibility. The different connotations of the male and the female name for defining hijra identity in the eyes of the state point towards the wider gender dynamics that inform judicial and administrative reasoning and thus the limits of the subjunctive that ritual tries to enact through the name changing practices of the hijras.

Conclusion

27 Based on extended fieldwork among the hijras and an assembling of legal documents in which hijras were implicated as criminals, I have argued that the multiple names that hijras take during their life course index changes in bodies, kinship status, and position within their social milieu. These name-changing practices also encode the erosion of relationships and the hopes for new and different futures. But as subjects of the state, hijras’ multiple names create problem for both it and them. The state, as we have seen, seeks to render hijras commensurable with its technologies of government. The male names of hijras in the legal documents that I examined not only reveal the dynamic of asli-nakli but also the imagination of violence as quintessentially male in the juridical unconscious. I read the juridical interpretation of hijras as criminals to argue for the relevance of psychoanalytical theories in thinking about law and representation. Paradoxically, the social field is drawn between the criminality of the nakli hijra and the incorruptibility of the asli hijra. If names are actualizations of different phenomenological, juridical and temporal properties of the person that move between the public and the private, the generic and the singular, then the volatility of hijra names provides us with a unique perspective on the movement between the subjunctive and the actual, the real and its doubles, through which relationships are sustained and destroyed.

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NOTES

1. For a recent discussion of this shifting criteria making amongst hijras, please see Delwar Hussain (2013). Though Hussain was talking about hijras who eke out a living through sex work on the India-Bangladesh border, it shows the persistence and widespread nature of the concern with identifying real hijras. 2. Gayatri Reddy, defines izzat as follows: ‘A Farsi word originally, the term izzat refers most closely to the constellation of meanings glossed in English as honor or respect’ and shows how it is used by hijras to evaluate their status, identity, practice and behavior (2006, 487).

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3. I explore the spatial organization of hijra communities in Bhadrak and the multiple relations they maintained with their formally wedded wives, their husbands and male lovers many of who were also their clients, in my PhD dissertation (see Saria 2014). 4. The guru-cela relationship that is characteristic of hijra kinship seeks to replace biological kinship and thus requires hijras to renounce their familial duties; how successful this endeavor is an important topic to study but is outside the purview of this article. The relationship is an important marker of hijras’ asceticism and thus also a qualification of being ritual-specialists. Both Gayatri Reddy (2005) and Serena Nanda (1999) have studied this extensively. Not every guru- cela relationship seeks to replace biological kinship; some actually aim to supplement it. Please see Copeman & Ikegame (2012) for other models of the guru-cela relationship. 5. Please see Cohen (2005) for a description and analysis of such a contest over accusations of being nakli. 6. Nati-celas are disciples of the disciple of the guru. They are analogous to grandchildren or natis. 7. On the subjunctive character of ritual see Puett (2014). 8. The word Kinnar itself refers to a hijra but it is an attempt to accrue more respect than the word hijra which is a word thrown around pejoratively amongst non-hijras. 9. I gratefully acknowledge the help of Pratiksha Baxi, Sruti Chaganti, and Pooja Satyogi who have helped me track and understand these legal documents. 10. Gayatri Reddy has documented that in the hijra household in Hyderabad where she conducted her fieldwork hijras were often recorded in the archive of the hijra household with Muslim male names irrespective of their religion even when they were given hindu female names upon initiation. Though these names were not used or circulated for addressing the hijra till they reached the level of the seniority of a nayak in the hierarchy or hijra social organization, they served the purpose of consolidating the inheritance of and identification with of the hijras rather than maleness. This was reflected in the fact that the hijras who were members of a hijra gharana in Orissa would also have Muslim names recorded but female ones and once again they were recorded but not circulated. The fact that the legal documents show no concern for such a carefully administered circulation of the male name, which once again is not the male name that hijras were given at birth, let alone an alias, reveals the jurispathic tendencies of law. Robert Cover (1986) has argued ‘that judges of the state are jurispathic—that they kill the diverse legal traditions that compete with the state’ (1610). The fact that in the legal documents I have cited there is no mention of hijra rituals and Hindu male names are recorded as well as Muslim ones, without the clarification of where and how those names were acquired reveal a commitment to a certain idea of biology at the expense of the fact that hijras themselves might have a different relationship to violence through which they would gauge justice and culpability. 11. The familiarity between the police officers and the hijras resulted not only from the regular harassment for bribes but also because Bhadrak, Jajpur and Bhawanipatna (the district headquarter of Kalahandi) were small towns. The regularity of such harassment meant only that this violence was gratuitous given that the police already knew who was castrated and who wasn’t. 12. I would like to thank one of my reviewers who pointed out that nakli could also mean ‘copy’ or ‘imitation’ from its usage in Urdu and not just false which is the way it is used in Hindi. This allows me to note that often in the marketplaces of Bhadrak (which has the highest proportion of the Muslim population in Orissa) where the hijras would flirt and engage in very sexual conversations with men, the word nakli would be used not so as to imply that the hijra was actually a male person but that she was a ‘copy’ or an ‘imitation’ of a woman because she could not give birth to children. Thus, in the contexts of intimacy and flirting the word nakli would be used by men to provoke hijras into inviting them to try and get them pregnant. For example, the protocols of flirting would be as follows: A young man might say to a hijra, ‘oh what can you give me? You are not a real woman, can you get pregnant?’ The hijra might respond and say, ‘Why

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don’t you try and get me pregnant?’ or ‘You can’t get me pregnant because your own weapon is not working and you are blaming me.’ In the context of violence though, nakli would imply falseness indicative of corruption. Please see Saria (forthcoming). 13. Hijras claim to be incorruptible because of their asceticism. The discourse they deploy to ratify their incorruptibility understands the existence of family as pressing a moral force of kinship that explains if not excuses the corruption of people, specifically of politicians. Hijras are not the only people who equate the lack of family and biological kinship with the lack of corruption; several politicians also claim such a vantage point to make a case to garner votes during elections. I shall be discussing the figure of the hijra politician in the next section. Please see Gayatri Reddy (2003) and Lawrence Cohen (2004) for a discussion of the figure of the hijra politician.

ABSTRACTS

This article begins by studying the ritualized changing of names that hijras undertake and proposes that we understand them as a subjunctive, which is to say that these rituals create an order in which names and the selves they entail can be shed for new ones. I then show that the failure of this subjunctive mode of fashioning one’s past and future is met in its confrontation with the law, which names the hijra in a discernible pattern in order to locate criminality and identity with her male name. I argue that this implication of maleness reveals a commitment not only to biology and sex but also an Oedipal understanding of violence. This understanding links naming with the dynamic of asli (real) and nakli (false) and draws a social field between the two through the figures of the hijra politician and the hijra criminal.

INDEX

Keywords: hijra, ritual, law, psychoanalysis, criminality

AUTHOR

VAIBHAV SARIA

Institute of Socio-Economic Research on Development and Democracy (ISERDD), New Delhi

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Naming the Deity, Naming the City: Rama and Ayodhya

Deepak Mehta

AUTHOR'S NOTE

Many thanks to the anonymous referees for their meticulous comments and important suggestions. I would also like to thank Pratiksha Baxi and Yasmeen Arif for criticism and for inviting me to present this work in the respective research colloquia run by them. The generosity of Jacob Copeman and Veena Das is more than matched by their acute insights and observations regarding this paper. ‘When you were young you were called Ramabhadra. As you grew older and looked beautiful, the people named you Ramachandra; when you commenced to speak, they called you Vedha-Brahma; Raghunatha on your ascension to the throne, and Janaki-pati when you were married to Janaki. I bow to you, O king of the gods, Mahatma, and the life of Janaki’ Ayodhya Mahatmya 1875: 142–43 ‘The mystical analysis of the word Ayodhya has its roots in the doctrine of the eternity of sound, combining in itself the iconography of the terrestrial city and the sound of divine reality… The linguistic etymology that follows this mystical one explains the word “a-yodhya” as meaning unconquerable’ Bakker, Vol. II 1986: 23 1 The town of Ayodhya, situated in the district of Faizabad in the state of Uttar Pradesh in north India, is a place of pilgrimage for devotees of the Hindu god Rama. Ayodhya,

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they hold, is his janmasthan (birthplace) that is marked by a temple. 1 Until December 1992 the birthplace was also the site of a mosque, known since the 1940s as the Babri Masjid.2 From at least the middle of the 19 th century Ayodhya has witnessed bitter violence between Hindus and Muslims regarding the exact status of this spot. Hindu believers argue that the Babri Masjid, constructed in 1528 by a general in the army of the Mughal emperor Babur, took the place of the razed temple of the janmasthan. In law we find a long history of litigation—since 1885 civil courts at various levels of the judicial hierarchy (Sessions Courts, District Courts, High Courts and the Supreme Court of India) have debated the status of the temple-mosque complex. This litigation is ongoing and there is nothing to suggest a resolution.3 The judicial record names this complex as the Ayodhya dispute. Beginning in the 1980s, a number of Hindu organizations, collectively called the Sangh Parivar, advocated the destruction of the mosque and its replacement by a grand temple dedicated to Rama. Following prolonged political and religious mobilization, Hindus congregated at its site demolished the mosque on 6 December 1992. The Liberhan Commission of Enquiry estimates that about 150,000 people had gathered around the temple-mosque complex on that day and that 150 ‘karsevaks’ (religious workers) actually participated in its destruction.4

2 Given that the Ayodhya dispute is extensively covered in civil and criminal law, how might we construct claims and counter claims—to property, modes of worship, rules of evidence and the demands of secularism?5 In this paper I follow a slightly different line of enquiry by asking myself how claims to the past are reckoned and admitted in courts of law. These declarations of rights, almost without fail, denote a complex that exceeds what is specifically being argued. From the point of view of Hindu worshippers, these claims to the past are detailed in the proper noun, which designates an ensemble of virtues tied to specific architectural sites in Ayodhya. In this way we may draw the relation between the Rama deity and the city of Ayodhya. The resonance of these two names in law provides the most commodious frame within which the dispute may be understood. From the point of view of Muslim claims after 1992, the Babri Mosque has lost its character as a mosque, but leaves traces of its disappearance in law. What has disappeared can be identified and named, but its ‘en-tonguing’ in law is a betrayal of being, since the name Babri Mosque does not ensure the presence of its materiality, much less Muslim forms of worship.6 3 I rely on two types of texts to make my case. Separated in time by 130 years, the importance of these records is that they index a community of names that continue to carry ethical weight in the present. The two texts—the Ayodhya Mahatmya (Testament to Ayodhya; henceforth AM) of 1875 and the Allahabad High Court Judgment of 2010 (2010 ADJ I, II, III, [Special F.B.]) provide a glimpse into possible worlds, marked by the appearance and power of and the disappearance of the Babri Mosque.7 In reading these two texts together I show how the High Court decision is aligned to the Ayodhya Mahatmya. The Mahatmya passes on a textual object to the High Court—the many names of Rama. In this passing there is more than a simple confirmation of the High Court decision. This transit, marked by a temporal continuity, rests on the repertoire of the names of Rama tied to the spaces of the town. The result is a conventional orienting framework that almost stages the High Court decision with the AM acting as a thesaurus for the name. In this text the names of Rama occur as a constellation of ritual practices, while in the High Court, these practices unfold or, are more appropriately, organized into a stretch of legal discourse, hived off from

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empirical evidence. In effect, such practices are ‘entextualized’ in the way that Barber (2007: 107–109) uses the term. 4 The Allahabad High Court verdict of 2010 attempted to provide a solution to the 125- year-old Ayodhya dispute by a threefold division of the property of the complex. The majority decision gave the litigants—two groups of Hindus and one of Muslims, an equal share. The AM of 1875 finds explicit mention in the judgments. A year later the Supreme Court overturned this verdict. As it stands now, the four basic suits that make up the dispute in civil jurisdiction are being heard and argued in the Allahabad High Court sitting at Lucknow. In its destruction, the mosque leaves traces of its fading in law—it is almost as if the name, Babri Mosque, is a necessary condition for inscribing disappearance. Although after 1992 the Babri Mosque is not available as an architectural structure, its circulation in the High Court judgment is presupposed as the background of the judicial decision. This decision, in turn, rests on what remains in place of the mosque. In part what remains are ruins, but also in part, a re-imagination of Rama and the city. I begin with this re-imagination. 5 The pair, Rama-Ayodhya has magical powers. The union of these two terms reveals the link of architectural place to mythic time, a bond that is ostensibly a non-negotiable example of our politico-religious present. Furthermore, the pair is shrouded in an aura signalling that this is the place where the Rama temple should have been, or will be, constructed. The aura, given the troubling presence of the absent mosque, indicates the inability to express fully the meaning of the pair according to the rules of a predictable truth game. This is because the couple marks the place where historical knowledge sees its competence impugned. In its place Rama-Ayodhya signposts a view of time that is both continuous and broken. In one type of text, Rama and Ayodhya are employed as if their designation were stable and all the units—symbols, icons and forms of prayer— depending on their relationship were already collected into an integrated and timeless complex. But secondly, the pair’s open future emerges from the ongoing movement of the past as it comes to inhabit contemporary legal accounts. This emergence is unstable: Rama and Ayodhya signal an open, chaotic union where forms of prayer and revealed symbols jostle for space in the legitimacy of the nation-state. This paper unpacks this temporality by centring on the discursive content of the two names— Rama and Ayodhya. In so doing my intention is to show how Ayodhya is materialized through the many names of Rama, and how the deity Rama, in turn, is invigorated in the geography of this temple town. 6 For the above reasons, rather than consider Rama and Ayodhya as ‘rigid designators,’ I will discuss the relationship between them in terms of a family resemblance.8 By this I mean that the significance of both Rama and Ayodhya is maintained by dense networks of water bodies and buildings; together the two names alert us to a cluster of virtues, which endure and subsist, as much as they develop in response to change; together, the two are a past, but a past that inhabits the present. As a complex of enduring virtues the pair fixes space to time; as a complex of mobile centres, the pair functions like a parasite, leaching off secular law and seeming to provide its raison d’être. That is to say, the only way in which the Allahabad High Court decision admits the validity of Hindu claims is by acknowledging the tractability of mythic time in its proceedings. In this way, Rama and Ayodhya provide a counter to historic time and rules of evidence based on empirical detail, thereby exposing secular law’s insufficiency.

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7 At the heart of this paper is an attempt to understand how these two names intersect. Rather than showing their referential and predicative qualities, I will argue that the relationship between these names allows us to think of the present as ceaseless. But this perpetual present is also marked and disrupted by the absent Babri mosque. The value of this mark is that, at least in the legal record, it haunts the link of Rama to Ayodhya. It could be argued that this haunting becomes possible since the name Rama is empty—it occurs in fiction and has no semantic function other than its place in a story. I do not consider the name Rama to be empty. Nor do I ask whether Rama really existed since that question is unintelligible. In terms of the texts that I am considering, the story of Rama in Ayodhya is not merely a commemoration but a kind of unlimited chart, where all duration, corporeal and ethereal, can be located in relation to the fixed and determinate guidelines of the Hindu calendar. As I see it the semantic function of Rama, in the context of Ayodhya, is to designate others, specifically, the town and to ground this designation in the calendar. In so doing, the question that is asked by both the Ayodhya Mahatmya and law is: what makes life possible? As answer, one may say that the virtues by which life is made liveable are drawn out in the Mahatmya and it is these virtues that are exalted in law as action in the present. But this answer assumes an unbroken temporal continuity between the Mahatmya of 1875 and the High Court judgment of 2010. I suggest that this stability is disrupted by a third name that cannot be invoked in this complex of virtues. This third name is of course the Babri Masjid. 8 This paper is divided into two parts. In the first, taking the Ayodhya Mahatmya, I will detail the ways in which Rama and Ayodhya are predicates of named terrestrial spaces and water bodies. Together, the force of these predicates is activated by religious pilgrimages and oblations organized around the Hindu festival calendar. In this way the material city and the deity are tied to eternal, ceaseless time. In the second part I will argue that this temporality is negotiated and contested in secular law, specifically in pronouncements and testimony that consider how the Rama deity establishes dominion over the janmasthan (the place where Rama was born) and the janmabhumi (the town of Ayodhya). But a third name—the absent Babri Mosque—in haunting judicial accounts of this dominion, functions like a spectre, inflecting judicial pronouncements with the force of historical facticity. 9 Within the history and mythology of Ayodhya, the name may, in the sense outlined above, point us to an eternal present as well as a revenant. Derrida (1994) uses the metaphor of haunting to witness unsettled and troubling histories—a plea for justice on behalf of those who are not there. Half suppressed memories appear and disappear among us in the manner of a revenant. Haunting for Derrida is a crossing between presence and absence—what he calls the ‘spectrality effect’ (1994: 48), an effect that houses ghosts. The Babri mosque, too, may be understood as a revenant, but in a way that is more literal and agentive than Derrida’s revenant. The mosque here is not merely a rhetorical figure that undoes the binary between presence and absence. Its demolition puts into crisis, or at any rate introduces, instability in law. In law, the mosque is constituted and reconstituted in Ayodhya, but as a figure that is central in its absence from its geography. Debates around this absence force secular bureaucrats and judges to engage with popular (and populist) Hindu religiosity, pointing, in the process to the name Babri Masjid as an unquiet absence. The ghostly claims of this name carry ethical weight in the resolution of the Ayodhya dispute, indicating a sense of rights and obligations, sometimes contested, at other times glossed over between those who argue

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for the Rama temple and those who plead for the presence of the demolished mosque. Sometimes, quite literally, we hear of laments for a lost ground, as if the memory of the dead has also been killed. But if the plight of the mosque evokes a vision of ethical order projected onto the court, its condition as a ghost, as haunting, is a condition of unpredictability and paradox.

Ayodhya Mahatmya

10 The frame story of this paraphrase is presented as a conversation between Siva and Parvati. Siva proclaims the Ayodhya Mahatmya and Parvati acts as an interlocutor, wanting to know the significance of particular places in the city.9 The text begins by providing a broad outline of Ayodhya, detailing its mythic origins and establishing its dimensions.10 The 1875 AM says that it was built on Rama’s sudarshanchakra (chariot), while other recensions say that Visvakarma built the city. In the text Ayodhya resembles the eternal city of the gods but what is specific is that the celestial city is linked to forts, palaces, city halls and lakes that are found in the actual town. The AM provides an outline of the holy kshetra (field) around the town. The traditional dimensions of the town are 12 yojanas (1 yojana=7 km) in length and 3 yojanas in width. The rivers Saryu and Tamasa form the northern and southern borders of the holy places in the city. Most pilgrimages described lie within these borders, although this paraphrase describes some holy places to the south of the Tamasa as well. The average distance between the two rivers is about 20 kilometres. The city is said to have the form of a fish of which the head lies in a ford of the Saryu river, called Gopratara and the tail at an unspecified part in the east.

11 As we know it now, Ayodhya is located on a curve of the Saryu River, which girdles the town on three sides. The eastern and western boundaries are made up of marshes, with the latter spreading to neighbouring Faizabad. The middle of the town known as Kot Ramchandar or Ramkot, is dotted with innumerable temples and maths (monasteries). The southwestern side of Ramkot, named Kubertila, is strewn with bricks and stones, most of them from the demolished Babri mosque. The 1875 edition describes Ramkot as a fort ringed by gates and protected by Hanuman, Sugriva and Angad, Nala and Nila, and Sokhain. Just beyond the fort, at its eastern, western and northern boundaries, splendorous palaces are described, made up of gem encrusted stones and diamonds. 12 In the centre of Kubertila is the janmasthan, which is also the site of the demolished Babri mosque. The most conspicuous fact relating to the pilgrimage around the janmasthan is that a description of this principal holy place is found in all the recensions of the AM, and yet the pilgrimage is not mentioned in any of the classical sources. ‘Such a silence is all the more surprising in view of the fact that archaeological evidence indicates the existence of a temple at this tirtha [pilgrimage] in the eleventh century’ (Bakker, Vol. II: 143). The AM connects the janmasthan with an elaborate description of Ramnavmi (celebrated as the birthday of Rama) and provides the spatial dimensions within which the birth occurred. This area stretches more than 500 dhanus (910 metres) westwards of the dwelling of a sage called Lomasa, 1008 dhanus (1835 metres) eastwards of a monastery occupied by the Ramanandi sect, called Vighnesvara and 100 dhanus (182 metres) from Buddhist ruins called Unmatta, in an unspecified direction. In the middle of this area the royal palace called janmasthan is situated. A monastery called Ramgulela is believed to represent Lomasa. Janaki’s kitchen, the text

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says, is northwest of the janmasthan, and 40 yards to the north of janmasthan is the house of Kaikeyi (the mother of Rama’s brother, Bharata). 60 yards to the south of this house is the dwelling of Sumitra, mother of Rama’s younger brothers, Satrughana and Lakshmana. Southeast of the janmasthan is the sitakup, also known as the Jnanakup. The sages, Brihaspati, Vasishta and Vamadeva drink its waters. 13 After the demolition of the mosque in Kubertila, a makeshift temple, apparently marking the exact place of the birth of Rama, was erected in the central dome. The temple is enclosed by railings and is guarded by a number of security personnel. No Muslims are allowed to enter the precincts and Hindus may come only as far as the fence in front of the entrance gate. The temple itself is located on a small altar, near which groups of Hindus engage in continuous prayer and kirtana (hymn). During my visit to Ayodhya in 2008, a pamphlet (in English) distributed among pilgrims read: Shri Ramjanmabhumi of Ayodhya is a very sacred place. Anticipating Hindu-Muslim friction, the Govt. has declared it a disputed place and has taken possession over it. Regular case is being conducted in the civil and criminal court. Since December 27, 1949 day and night Akhand Kirtan [unlimited chanting or hymn] is being performed with a determination that it will continue so long as Ramjanmabhumi is not freed. It is the sacred duty of the entire Hindu Community to finance this holy cause donations (sic) and thus earn immense PUNYA [virtue and grace]. The deities can be seen through iron railings and offerings can be made through their bars. On special occasions groups of Hindus, eleven to a unit, are allowed to proceed beyond the railing to worship Rama and his brothers’ deities. 14 The ghats (bathing places), the most important of which is known as Svargadvara (lit. gate to paradise), are situated along the Saryu and lie about 700 meters to the north of Ramkot. Gopratara, about 8 kilometres to the west of Ramkot, is the site of a second major bathing place. The 1875 AM says that Svargadvara, known also as Negeshvara and Muktidvara (gate of deliverance) is at 318 yards to the east of the thousand- streamed Lakshmana kund (pond or lake). ‘All men, Hindus and Muslims, who die here go to the place of Vishnu,’ and that ‘Ramachandra in the form of Bharata, Satrughan, Lakshmana and his own, greet them there.’ Svargadvara is made up of seven ghats: Chandrahari, Guptahari, Chakrahari, Vishnuhari, Dharmahari, Bilvahari and Punyahari. These baths are said to extend over a distance of 636 dhanus (1157 metres) to the east of Sahasradhara. Effectively, this includes the entire northern and north-eastern side of Ayodhya along the riverbed as far as another bathing place known as the Janakitirtha. A ruined mosque, dating to the time of Aurangzeb called Treta-ke-Thakur, is located 250 metres east of Chandrahari. Various temples lie along these ghats—the Saryumandir and the Nagesvaranathmandir are the important ones. The more recent ones are called Caturbhuji ka Mandir and Vidhiji ka Mandir, both occupied by the Ramanandi sect. Associated with these bathing places are water bodies, mainly ponds or lakes. This AM names more than 50 water bodies, most of which are associated with pilgrimages during specific months of the lunar calendar.

15 For purposes of brevity we may establish the following link between water bodies, pilgrimages and terrestrial palaces/residential buildings.

KUNDS PILGRIMAGE

Madant Dhavan (bathing area) 9th day of the dark half of Chait (March-April)

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Hanumat Every Tuesday

Sugriva (south of Hanumat) On Ramnavmi (light half of Chait)

Vibhishana (south of sugriva) On Ramnavmi (light half of Chait)

Agnikund (s.w. of Suvarnakhana) 1st day of dark half of Agrahayana (Nov-Dec)

Sitakund (middle of Asoka Vatika) 4th day of dark half of Agrahayana (Nov-Dec)

Kharjurakund (s. of Vidyakund) Every Sunday

Kausalyakund (w. of dasrathkund) Last day of Bhadra (August-September)

Sumitrakund (w. of Kausalyakund) 15th day of Bhadra (August-September)

Kaikeyikund (s. of Sumitrakund) 15th day of Bhadra (August-September)

Urvashikund (e. of Yoginikund) 3rd day of the light half of Bhadra (August-September)

Vrihaspatikund (e. of Urvashikund) 5th day of the light half of Bhadra (August-September)

Rukminikund (e. of Vrihaspatikund) 9th day of the dark half of Kartika (Oct-Nov)

Sagarakund (n.e. of Vasisthakund) Last day of Kartika (Oct-Nov)

Brahmakund (n.e. of Sagarakund) 4th day of the light half of Kartika (Oct-Nov)

Rinamochan11 (n.e. of Brahmakund) Dark half of Magha (Jan-Feb)

16 Just as water bodies are associated with specific pilgrimages, so also terrestrial places are linked to pilgrimages. The following is a small list.

PLACES PILGRIMAGES

Svargadvara Full moon of Jyaistha (May-June)

Janmasthan Fast on Ramnavmi, bright half of Chait

Vidya pith (w. of Vidya kund) 8th day of every month

Vishnuhari shrine (w. of Dhanyaksha) 10th day of light half of Kartika (Oct-Nov)

Sitaladevi temple (n. of Mantresvara) Every Monday

Bandidevi temple (n. of Sitaladevi) Every Tuesday

House of Rishyasringa Rishi Light half of Chait (March-April)

Bhairav temple (s. of Ramkund) Dark half of Agrahayana (Nov-Dec)

Nagari temple (near Lakshmi temple) Light half of Bhadra (Aug-Sept)

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Sapneshvaradevi temple 8th/14th of every month

Ramrekha (s.e. of ) Light half of Kartika (Oct-Nov)

17 The linking of water bodies to places of pilgrimage establishes correspondence between the order of the world and that of ordinary action; more appropriately, ordinary time is integrated as part of an eternal order. This integration is instituted in the calendar.12 I follow Ricœur (1988: 105–09) in suggesting that the calendar marks a time of fabulation in three different ways. First, the calendar establishes a founding event—the creation of the city on Rama’s chariot. This creation initiates a new era, determining the axial moment in reference to which every other event is dated. Thus the topography of Ayodhya is described after its institution as janmabhumi. The axial moment gives to the calendar a form of time that is external to physical and lived time and it is this that expresses the specificity of fabulation. It cosmologizes lived time and humanizes cosmic time and in this way the time of the fable is re-inscribed into the time of the world.

18 Second, by referring to the founding event we see how time flows in two directions— from the past towards the present, and from the present toward the past. This flow establishes a closed loop and fixes the architecture of the city. This fixing, then, allows for the AM to be used as a map so that terrestrial spaces and water bodies are oriented in terms of cardinal directions and in relation to each other. It is this fixity that allowed for the AM to be used as a map for the coronation of the English King. This orientation makes time spatial. 19 Finally, we find a set of units of measurement that designate and establish the dimension of the city. But these designations are more than spatial. We find constant intervals between the day, the week and the month marked by the recurrence of cosmic phenomena and miracles. In the calendar this establishes a division between the light and dark half of the month, and the month itself is an interval between the conjunction of the waxing and waning moon. 20 Through the calendar, the link between Rama and Ayodhya becomes a means of ordering the city. Each pilgrimage, each oblation offered establishes a present marked by the infinite repetition of virtue. In the process, this present adjudicates the practice of affirming the birthplace and the land of birth of the Rama deity. The importance of these virtues is that they invigorate and make whole the worshipper in the city and it is in this way that the calendar itself becomes an ethical doctrine. Against the postulate of a beginning and an end, the calendar establishes a present. When the birthplace and the land of birth enter adjudication, we find explicit references to the Rama deity and the birthplace as jural beings. In the process, the Babri Mosque circulates in articles of law and loses its specificity as an architectural entity. It becomes a revenant. For this reason, if law accounts for the finitude of the Ayodhya dispute, then the placing of the Rama deity at the heart of its decisions is not without its problems. It is to this problematic placing that I now turn.

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The revenant in the High Court

21 In tracing the revenant and its disruptive presence I consider two modes of judicial accounting. In the first part I read the accounts of witnesses called to testify in the High Court, specifically as they describe the demolished Babri mosque and the family of terms within which it is enveloped.13 The second section details how the three judges, in their separate findings, made a case for the jural deity and named this mosque. In testimony we get a kind of messianic time that is activated through pilgrimages and ritual observances, but a time that almost always looks sideways at the absent mosque, while the decisions of the three justices show how the demolition is worked upon and made habitable in law. In the process, rather than indicating the demands of this or that litigant, these decisions act like a speech prosthetic, by which inanimate objects (such as the deity and the mosque) become voluble. While the deity is enmeshed within an eternal present, the demolished mosque dislocates. The decisions orient themselves to this doubling by pointing to a vertiginous simultaneity of time. The mosque haunts this eternal present. Gordon (1997) thinks of haunting as signifying a social figure, which is then mined for its poetic potential. Rather than consider the mosque as a unit of signification I follow its career not simply for the poetic potential that it allows, but because its demolition and subsequent appearance as a ghostly figure puts into crisis the future of the Rama temple itself.14

22 Before I present the testimonies I will outline how they are framed within the ‘gist of the findings’ of the three judges. 23 Justice SU Khan: The ‘disputed structure’ was constructed as a mosque by and under orders of the Mughal emperor Babur and no temple was demolished in its construction. But the mosque was constructed over the ‘ruins of temples,’ which were lying in ‘utter ruins’ for a very long time (2010 ADJ I: 115). 24 Justice SC Agarwal: It is declared that the area covered by the ‘central dome of the three-domed structure, i.e., the disputed structure being the deity of Bhagwan Ram Janamsthan and place of birth of Lord Rama as per faith and belief of Hindus, shall not be obstructed or interfered in any manner by the defendants’ (2010 ADJ III: 2871). 25 Justice Dharamveer Sharma: The ‘disputed structure is the birthplace of Lord Rama. The place of birth is a juristic person and a deity. The disputed building was constructed by Babur, the year is not certain, but it was built against the tenets of Islam […]. The disputed structure was built on the site of an old structure after demolition of the same. Thus, the structure could not have the character of a mosque.’ (2010 ADJ III: 3453) 26 What is clear is that the ‘disputed structure’ or three-domed structure (never the Babri mosque) was associated with ruins, with obstruction and interference and with demolition. We will see later how these terms, in alliance with proper nouns, come to circulate in the judicial account. 27 Testimony 1: Mahant Ram Vilas Das Vedanti, (in his affidavit of 2005 he says he is 51 years old. He was cross-examined by Tarunjeet Verma representing the Nirmohi Akhara, and by Zafaryab Jilani representing the Sunni Waqf Board). Ram Vilas, at the time of his deposition claimed to be the priest of a temple and had been living in Ayodhya since 1968. He holds a doctorate in grammar from the Varanasi Sanskrit College.

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Prior to the demolition of the disputed structure at the Sriram Janambhumi premises, the main gate for entry was in the east, which was called the Hanumatdwar […]. On entry to the disputed structure a platform towards the south was called Ramchabutra, where the idols of Lord Rama, Laxman, , etc. were present and were worshipped regularly by Hindu devotees. Below the Ramchabutra was the ‘cave temple.’ [What follows is an elaborate architectural description of the birthplace, ringed as it is, by a series of proper names of Hindu deities and places mentioned in the Ayodhya Mahatmya of 1875]. 28 Testimony 2: Raja Ram Pandey, 87 years old (affidavit of 2003), cross-examined by Zafaryab Jilani representing the Sunni Waqf Board.

29 Raja Ram Pandey was a resident of Kaushalya Ghat in Village Ramkot, the site of the demolished mosque. He had been living in Ayodhya since 1930. In March 1934 a Hindu-Muslim riot occurred when many Muslims were killed and a large number of graveyards were damaged, but no part of the Sriram Janmabhumi temple or its dome was damaged. The outer wall was damaged slightly. The Muslims were terror-stricken and they stopped going towards the temple. I was 19– 20 at that time. 30 What follows in this testimony is the same elaborate description of the architecture of the birthplace, of the deity and the form of worship.

31 Testimony 3: Narendra Bahadur Singh, 72 years (affidavit of 2004, cross-examined by the same lawyer as in Testimony 2). I gained maturity at the age of about 11 years […]. The structure collapsed on 6 December 1992 and thereafter my visits to the temple were reduced. 32 As with the other accounts, this one is rich in details on the geography of the birthplace, the place of deities and the various pilgrimages that occur around the year.

33 If Hindu accounts were meticulous in their evocation of the birthplace, Muslim testimonies focused on the status of the mosque. 34 Testimony 4: Maulana Atiq Ahmad, 47 years (affidavit of May 2010. Cross-examined by the advocates of the Nirmohi Akhara and by the Next Friends of the Deity). Nowhere in Islam does the style of mosque construction find specific mention. The name ‘masjid’ is given to a piece of land that is gifted for offering Namaz. Even if this building has no domes or minarets, it will be called a masjid. Even if there is a graveyard in the vicinity of the mosque, that does not change its character. You killed our people, you destroyed our graves. But the mosque remains. A mosque once constructed will always be a mosque […]. If the followers of other religions start practicing their religious faith in a mosque, then also the status of the mosque does not change. Other Muslim testifiers echo much the same sentiments. 35 In which way does the decision of individual judges intersect with such testimony? In considering the expectations of the litigants, the High Court judges actualize legal operations by consolidating existing norms, projecting their effects into the future and attempting to produce expectations based on re-installed or altered norms.

36 Let me briefly indicate the direction of how I think the name is being used in the pair Rama-Ayodhya. In the judicial decision, the name delivers the expectations of the litigants. In eliding the historical facticity of the mosque, the judicial decision also conveys that what is there differs from what is or was present before 6 December 1992. The names of Rama and Ayodhya are present in and of themselves. What becomes present after the demolition contracts into what is accessible as worship, as deity and

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birthplace. But the mosque returns and splits this access into what was present before 1992 and what is really there. The disputed structure complex, in its alliance with the destroyed , becomes a metonym for Rama and Ayodhya, ensuring that this place-name will forever be incomplete. This is because the Babri Mosque haunts the deity and its birthplace in appropriately spectral ways, an absence that sits side-by-side with an assumed presence, a stubborn response to the sacredness of Rama and Ayodhya. 37 For this reason, too, in Ayodhya Hindu worship is not without its doubts. With reference to the ‘Rama temple’ there is a kind of precautionary formula used in prayer. When I visited Ayodhya in 2008 I was advised to use expressions like, ‘whether you want to be called Rama or Lakshmana, or Gopal, hear my voice,’ and ‘if this is the name by which you would like to be called.’ Underlying this call to the name are the following sorts of questions. Do you need to know the name of the deity you’re praying to? If you get the name of the deity wrong, what happens to your prayer and your oblations? Who gets to decide whether the name works? (You, or the deity, or neither?) The name and birthplace of the deity are, as I have tried to show, not only a declarative (by which you move from the name to the city and vice-versa), whose invocation in law establishes an institutional fact, but also a mode of censorship by a specific community of Hindu devotees. The avowal of the name of the deity here must rest on a disavowal of the Babri Masjid. In other words, these questions sense the frisson of a spectral presence circulating uncertainly in articles of law but without material presence. It is not inconceivable that the Rama temple, if it is constructed on an officially controlled landscape, will not quite shake the presence of ghosts from disturbed graves and a demolished mosque. 38 The Deity and the Janmasthan: The names, Rama and Ayodhya and the Babri mosque, as they occur in the 2010 judgment, have a variable and flexible character. This is understandable since they are linked to a cluster of other names, made up of single or multiple rights and virtues. We have seen that these rights and virtues that make up Rama and Ayodhya come in thick bundles and in large clusters.15 In the case of the Babri mosque the cluster of other names within which it is located is hollowed out. Instead there is something like an ontological vacancy built into this name. But before I develop this argument further let me briefly delimit the relationship of Rama to Ayodhya. Put more elaborately, how is the juristic personality of the deity framed within the backdrop of the demolition of the Mosque, and how do we find a place for gods in the adjudication around the dispute?16 39 An obvious dimension of the name Rama is its relationship to property as Ayodhya. If the proper name denotes a person, in a common-sense way one assumes that person and property (being a thing) are mutually exclusive. The 2010 judgment, we will see below, qualifies this distinction, by showing that the legal rights and duties that make someone count as person and something count as property are shifting and variable. The name Rama bears the features of property, particularly janmabhumi and janmasthan, as much as it is exalted as a virtuous god-king. This doubling—of property and virtue—is found in the Allahabad High Court decision, but also in the lease deed executed between the Uttar Pradesh state government and the Shri Ram Janmabhumi Trust in 1992. Earlier in 1989, the Uttar Pradesh state government had acquired the land around the Babri Mosque and the plan was to build a grand temple dedicated to Rama. The Trust was established in 1989 to oversee the construction of a grand temple.

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40 The object of the Trust was to establish a religious theme park over state acquired land, approximately 56 acres that surrounded the mosque and various Hindu temples. The lease mentions that the object of the park was to, ‘create experience of the cultural aspects emerging from the great epic Ramayana […]. The park should be integrated with the overall development of that Ayodhya mentioned in the great Mahatmyas.’ A state appointed surveyor mapped, scheduled and delineated the red-boundary plot of land over which the park would be built. It would be called the Ramkatha Park, reflecting ostensibly the relation between the Kingdom of Rama and the present. The lease announced the precise birthplace of Rama, known as the janmasthan, and Ayodhya the janmabhumi. It would also function as the object of nationalist-religious pedagogy where inhabitants of the complex, dressed in Vedic period costume, arranged guided tours for school children. What was, thus, set in motion was a process of landscape interpretation, with the mosque as an ever-present eyesore. The lease deed, in the process, turned topography into a set enmeshed in scriptural signs that had to be read instead of being simply viewed. These signs imagined the park as a site of national regeneration and a pastoral landscape, an edited panorama, where the mosque could exist only between the visual registers of danger, Vedic authenticity and political invisibility. 41 In 1989 a suit was filed by three plaintiffs: Sri Ramalala Virajman, the Asthan Rama Janmabhumi, Ayodhya (O.O.S. No. 5 of 1989) and a Vaishnava Hindu who argued that the Rama deity, installed in the central dome of the mosque, and the place of birth were juiristic persons. It also declared that the entire premises of Sri Rama Janmabhumi at Ayodhya belonged to the plaintiff deities and asked for a perpetual injunction against the defendants (the Sunni Waqf Board, the Nirmohi Akhara, Gopal Singh Visharad and 24 others), prohibiting them from interfering with or raising objections to the construction of the new temple building at Sri Rama Janmabhumi, Ayodhya. 42 The Allahabad High Court attempted to resolve the above suit by arguing that both the janmasthan and Rama Lala (Child Rama), surreptitiously installed in the central dome of the Babri Mosque in 1949, were jural persons. In so doing the judges located the subject of legal rights and duties on a threshold where judicial decision was marked by a continuous emergence from a sacral past into the future. This opening into the future can be elaborated through three basic issues posed by the High Court. The first issue (Justice Khan) considered whether the deity was a perpetual minor and if so, whether this minor was subject to the Limitation Act of 1963. The second matter (Justice Agarwal) dealt with the form of divinity and belief, specifically swayambhu (self- revealed image) and pran pratistha (infusion of breath into the deity). The third concern (Justice Sharma) was the link between the deity and the image. 43 As far as the status of the deity as a perpetual minor was concerned, Justice Khan considered whether the minor was entitled to the benefit of the Limitation Act of 1963. This Act raises the following question: if a person entitled to institute a suit or make an application for the execution of a decree is reckoned a ‘minor, or insane or an idiot’ (ADJ I: 80), can this person institute the same suit or execute an application, after the disability has ceased? Analogically, the deity, in the position of a minor, was unable to make an application itself or institute a suit, since it suffered from the same infirmities. The Justice, however, argued that the minor status of the deity was confined only to the purpose of filing a suit—in all other instances the deity was not a perpetual minor. Furthermore, as a minor it could never be freed from this disability. This meant that if

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the deity were a perpetual minor, then the limitation would never come to an end. In his order, Justice Khan declared ‘that the portion below the central dome where at present the idol is kept in a makeshift temple will be allotted to Hindus in final decree,’ thus pointing to the jural status of the Rama deity (ADJ I: 80). 44 Just as Justice Khan recognized the legal status of the deity, Justice Agarwal argued that both the deity and its place of birth were jural persons. Citing Ram Janki Deity Vs. State of Bihar, (1999 (5) SCC: 50), the Justice held that the birthplace was self-revealed (swayambhu), a product of infinite nature without beginning, and it was left to worshippers to simply discover its existence. Furthermore the swayambhu image did not require pratistha (consecration of breath); the act of worship gave the place the essential features of a temple. It was Justice Dharam Veer Sharma who provided the most elaborate explanation of the jural deity and birthplace. 45 To establish that the Babri Mosque was built after razing a Hindu temple, Justice Sharma decided to call on the assistance of ‘archaeological science’ (2010 ADJ III: 2927). Accordingly, the Archaeological Survey of India was directed by the Court in August 2002 to excavate the disputed site. The excavation, according to the Justice, revealed that the Ram Chabutra (platform), had ‘five different structural phases in its construction’ (2010 ADJ III: 2954).17 In its enlarged form it was ‘22 metres in east-west and about 14 metres in north-south orientation’ (2010 ADJ III: 2954). The survey found evidence of a massive structure that could be dated from the tenth century onwards. The Justice proceeded to quote from various sources to establish that the structure was a Rama temple. Verses from the Rig Veda were put alongside expert testimony, including those drawn from the Ministry of Steel and Mines, epigraphy and histories of ancient India. In effect, the Babri Mosque had usurped the place of the Rama temple (2010 ADJ III: 2970). 46 Having concluded that the massive structure razed in the construction of the Babri Mosque was a Rama temple, Justice Sharma went to great lengths to prove that this structure belonged to the deity, by contending that the latter was a jural person. Furthermore, it was not only the deity that was a jural person, but the birthplace itself was a jural entity. More than the deity, the janmasthan was swayambhu (self-revealed) and did not require any form of consecration. The consequence of considering the janmasthan and the Rama deity as jural persons meant that the two could not be alienated from each other though it was only in the ‘ideal sense that the idol is the owner of endowed properties’ (2010 ADJ: 3409) and could have no beneficial interest in the endowment.18 The attempt nevertheless was to make a case for Hindu forms of worship and to link these forms to Ayodhya incarnated as the name of Rama. The Justice was categorical in his assertion that ‘the religious right of Hindus to worship Ram Lala at the janmasthan became concretized before the Constitution came into being and the same requires to be protected,’ and that no plea could be entertained to prohibit this practise (2010 ADJ III: 3439). Furthermore Ayodhya itself was marked out through (circumambulation). Circumambulation of the Rama deity was of three types—40 kose, 14 kose and 5 kose (1 kose is approximately two miles). In the process, the movement from janmasthan (birthplace) to janmabhumi (land of birth) was secured. 47 What place did the Mosque have in this complex of names and territory? The final section of this paper addresses the absent Mosque. Referring to one of the original suits filed by the Sunni Central Waqf Board against various Hindu defendants and the state

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of Uttar Pradesh, Justice Khan asked whether the demolished building was a mosque, its date of construction, the exact plot of land on which it stood, its ownership till 1949, when its owners were dispossessed, and finally whether the Hindu devotees of Rama had ‘perfected right of prayers at the site by adverse possession’ (2010 ADJ I: 58).19 In effect, the issue that concerned this Justice was one that related to property ownership. In his findings he observed that the ‘disputed structure’ was constructed as a mosque under direct orders from the Mughal emperor Babur and that no temple was demolished in its construction. Yet, he observed, before 1855 the Ram Chabutra and Sita’s kitchen had come into existence inside the boundary wall of the mosque.20 This complex was called the Chabutra Masjid. In view of the above, both Hindu and Muslim parties and the Nirmohi Akhara were awarded joint possession of the entire premises (2010 ADJ I: 107–16). Thus, as property, in Justice Khan’s estimation the Babri Mosque was linked to the disputed structure and to the Chabutra Masjid. What was absented from his order was that the mosque had also been a site of Islamic prayer. In his prelude he perhaps admitted to a sense of loss—‘Here is a small piece of land (1500 square yards) where angels fear to tread. It is full of innumerable land mines. We are required to clear it […]. We do not propose to rush in like fools lest we are blown. However, we have to take a risk […]’ (2010 ADJ I: 27). 48 If Justice Khan was succinct in his order, his colleague Justice Sudhir Agarwal, more than made up for his economy of words. Extending to almost 3000 pages, the judgment provides a detailed survey of various records, from beyond antiquity to the present, oral testimonies, the deposition of witnesses, a reading of public reports and the discovery of lost objects following archaeological excavations. Justice Khan’s ‘small piece of land,’ was now fleshed out in greater detail. ‘The disputed structure is divisible into three parts. (1) The main roofed structure, (2) the inner courtyard, and (3) outer courtyard […]. On the outer courtyard there is a Chabutra which has been in possession of the Hindus’ (2010 ADJ I: 128). The Babri Mosque, in this rendition was associated with the ‘inner courtyard.’ It was also called a ‘three-arched structure,’ with ‘three broad but pointed arches on the façade. The liwan (sanctuary) that stood on a low plinth was composed of three square bays, roofed by three single broad and high domes’ (2010 ADJ I: 128). Inscriptions in Persian and from the Quran marked the pillars of this ‘three-arched structure.’ And yet what was demolished was not a mosque, for the inner and outer courtyard belonged to the deity. 49 In answer to the claim of the Sunni Waqf Board that the inner courtyard was a mosque under the care of the waqf Board, Justice Agarwal argued that ‘a deity is not damaged or comes to end due to destruction in any manner, since the spirit of Supreme Being continues to exist and it will not disappear, particularly when the deity is Swayambhu, i.e. self-created’ (2010 ADJ III: 2847). The janmabhumi similarly was swayambhu. The courtyard, inner and outer, therefore had a dual character, being both deity and property. From here he argued that ‘It is quite possible that the entire city may be held to be very pious and sacred on account of some occurrence of divinity or religious spirituality’ (2010 ADJ III: 2848). In answer to the claim that the disputed structure was a mosque constructed in 1528 by Babur and that namaz had been offered continuously till 1949, he said that it could not be established that the mosque was built in 1528 and that prayers had been offered in the mosque since that year. At best, the Friday prayer was offered from 1860 till 16 December 1949 and that too intermittently (2010 ADJ III: 2855). While this structure had a mutawalli (keeper of the mosque), he found the absence of a muezzin surprising. The mutawalli had not been appointed following due

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procedure, the possession of waqf could not be claimed by him and by extension the (Muslim) worshipper could not claim possession of waqf property. Given that there was evidence of namaz being offered at the site, the Justice held that part of the disputed structure was indeed a mosque, but that ‘there also existed a religious place of non- Islamic character before the construction of the disputed structure’ (2010 ADJ III: 2860). 50 If the mosque was built on usurpation could it really be a mosque? Quoting from Quranic verses Justice Dharam Veer Sharma argued that the waqif (person holding the waqf) must be the owner of property, and there is nothing on record to suggest that the emperor Babur, a Hanafi Muslim, had acquired the title of the temple. Accordingly, he could not erect a mosque against the tenets of Islam (2010 ADJ III: 2971–75). For this reason, the claim of the plaintiffs that the mosque was dedicated to Allah was decided against them. And even if the ‘building’ had been used by members of the Muslim community for offering prayers since the time of its construction, a non-Muslim now adversely possessed it (2010 ADJ III: 2976). Effectively, the mosque had become a temple.

Conclusion

51 In the view of the three judges of the Allahabad High Court the Babri Mosque was read in conjunction with ruins, a demolished building and property ownership. Called the Chabutra Masjid, it was set against the original Ram Chabutra and Sita’s rasoi (kitchen). Justice Agarwal divided the ‘Chabutra Masjid’ into an inner and outer courtyard. This three-arched structure was set against the swayambhu deity and janmasthan. Justice Sharma was the most emphatic. In his view the Babri Mosque was built against the tenets of Islam itself and it could never have been a place of legitimate prayer. Common to the three accounts was the view that the Babri Masjid was a disputed structure.

52 The difference between the janmasthan and the mosque as it has developed in this paper rests on the two being incommensurable. While the janmasthan is marked by a singularity that encompasses the town of Ayodhya, the mosque loses all specificity and becomes instead identified with prosaic nouns—a building, three-domed, three arched. When sacrality is associated with it, the mosque is recognized by terms that evoke Hindu modes of worship. And yet, in the High Court decisions the mosque returns, not in its materiality, not even as a catastrophe, but as a legally induced position. More appropriately, the mosque is a referent without a mental image and its evocation in the High Court is set against Rama/Ayodhya, elaborated first in the Mahatmya and then taken up by two of the three judges. Split off from its mental image, the mosque in the High Court is externalized and set against the temple, which exists, perversely enough, only as a mental image, never a reference. But because the mosque is set adrift of its status as a mosque it enters into an endless circulation in law, allowing for multiple readings—as waqf property, three-domed building, Chabutra masjid and so on. In this circulation the mosque in its demolition bursts out of the past as materiality and into the present as an article in law, indicating a disruption of linear time. It seems to get in the way of the putative Rama temple and it is for this reason that the High Court tries so hard to brush it aside.

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NOTES

1. For Ayodhya as an urban settlement connected to the Rama legend, see the magisterial work of Bakker (1986) and Lutgendorf (1997: 19–54). 2. In colonial times the mosque was often referred to as the masjid-i-janmasthan (literally, mosque of the birthplace). 3. In civil jurisdiction, four basic suits deal with the Ayodhya dispute in Independent India. A Hindu resident of Ayodhya, who claimed his right to worship at the birthplace without hindrance, filed the first suit on January 16, 1950. The second suit (1959) was filed by the Nirmohi Akhara (cloister), claiming that it was the sole religious order charged with maintaining and managing the birthplace. The third suit (1961), filed by the Sunni Waqf Board, sought a decree that the religious structure was a mosque to be handed over to the Board. The Next Friends of the Deity on behalf of the child god Rama filed the fourth suit in 1989. It claimed that both the deity and the birthplace were juristic persons. This suit forms the backbone of the Allahabad High Court decision of 2010. I will discuss the judgment later in the paper. 4. The Government of India constituted the Liberhan Enquiry Commission on 16 December 1992 to enquire into the circumstances of the destruction of the mosque and to establish criminal culpability. After several delays the report was tabled in the Indian parliament in 2009. 5. Aijaz Ahmad (2000), Sara Ahmad (1996: 320–50) and Sheetal Parikh (2005: 85–109) argue that the destruction of the mosque posed a fundamental challenge to the secular republic. Parikh, for example, says that ‘Ayodhya is not just a moment of India’s history; it is inextricably linked to the nation’s present and future’ (p. 86). But this view of the secular does not consider that which challenges it—religious belief and worship. Jan-Peter Hartung, et al. (2003) consider the religious but evacuate it of its belief system. For the analysis of Ayodhya as cultural property see Ram Sharma (2001: 127–38). 6. I follow Ophir (2005: 44) to suggest that if law en-tongues the Babri Mosque, it does so by becoming complicit in the game of hide and seek.

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7. The NCC (New Catalogus Catalogorum, prepared by V. Raghavan), an alphabetic register of Sanskrit and allied works, mentions 36 recensions of the Ayodhya Mahatmya, derived in turn from the Skandapurana, the Padmapurana or from no works at all. We also find Hindi translations, such as those of Panini Pandey and Suryakaladevi Pandey, Sriramagopala Pandey or paraphrases, such as those of (1875). I will base myself on this latter text since it was the guidebook used to map the city for the coronation of King Edward VII. For an authoritative description of the 3 major recensions of the AM, see Bakker (1986, Vol. I, Vol. II). 8. As I understand Kripke (1972), the basic idea of the rigid designator is one where the expression in question has a fixed designation (given the context of its use) when considering various counterfactual situations. Given this, the name Rama will not be able to designate in worlds where Rama does not exist. Rather than use Rama (or Ayodhya, or the Babri mosque) as a rigid designator, I assume that the meaning of a proper name is neither fixed nor determined, but is supported by a series of links. In so doing it may seem that my argument is derived from Searle’s (1958) article on proper names. Names, he says, do not function as descriptions, but as ‘hangars’ around which descriptions congeal. Further, if names have sense it is only because they connect with objects to which they refer. For this reason, names can be substituted by definite descriptions. The material that I am working with shows that names are also descriptions, but descriptions activated by other names. Other names (I am thinking here of the name Babri Masjid) are by the same process de-activated (I thank Jacob Copeman for this insight). It seems to me more useful, therefore, to work with a family of names. This particular family, indicated by the union of Rama to Ayodhya, is as is true of most families, also haunted by an outsider or interloper—the Babri Masjid. 9. The story is obviously incomplete and may be filled in by other recensions. This incompleteness allows for additions, extrapolations and modifications, but it is not central to my purpose in the paper. Suffice it to say that this AM is a discourse in the sense that Benveniste (1971) outlines its distinction from historical narrative. Discourse, he says, designates ‘every utterance assuming a speaker and a hearer, and in the speaker, the intention of influencing the other in some way’ (Benveniste 1971: 209). Furthermore, distinct from narrative, discourse includes three basic tenses: the present, future and perfect tenses. The present is the basic tense of the discourse because it marks the contemporaneousness of what is stated with the instance of discourse. It is thus tied to the self-referential character of the instance of discourse. This instance, we will see later is a spectral present. 10. The city is the residence of the dynasty to which Rama belongs, the Iksvaku. 11. Rinamochan, the text says, is at a distance of 200 yards from Brahmakund. Its water joins the Saryu. A pilgrimage here is recommended for those in debt since it ‘wipes off debts.’ Likewise Papamochan, 40 yards from Rinamochan, erases sins. Its pilgrimage is recommended on the 5th day of the light half of Sravana (July-Aug). 12. The Hindu calendar is made up of 12 months. Where relevant I have provided correlations with the Gregorian calendar. Each month of the Hindu calendar begins in the third week of the Gregorian month. Each Hindu month is also divided into a light and dark half, corresponding with the waxing and waning moon. The waxing phase is known as the Shukla, while the waning phase is called Krishna. 13. I have 27 affidavits of testifiers. While there is a standard form of description, I find that, unlike First Information Reports in the recording of a crime in the police station, these affidavits are marked by cross-referentiality. They anticipate arguments; provide a way of addressing the silences of other accounts and most often supporting the testimonies of others. This cross- referentiality creates the impression of the flow of time, making possible the process of remembering and commemorating the past. But from affidavits presented by Muslim defendants and plaintiffs, the mosque seems to be situated between the past and future horizon of Hindu forms of worship.

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14. Here I am in agreement with Kilroy-Marac (2014: 255–76). In the story she tells of ghostliness in a psychiatric clinic in Senegal, Kilroy-Marac moves between the actual and virtual to suggest that foreign ghosts haunt according to a different set of rules from domestic ghosts (2014: 264). Within the disputed complex in Ayodhya, it is as if the mosque is made foreign and thus a different set of rules must apply to its presence as an interloper or usurper. 15. In earlier papers I have argued that such bundles make up the idea of property (Mehta 2015), as much as they constitute the idea of the legal person (Mehta 2015, forthcoming). 16. An extensive literature discusses the deity as a jural person (Appadurai, 1981; Mukherjea, 1952; Sontheimer, 1964). I do not reference the intricate moves by which the jural deity changes its contours—from domestic disputes during the 1870s onwards, to its status in temples. In the story he tells of the Pathur , Davis (2010: 195–206) shows how the Hindu god Siva became the owner of his own property, namely the Nataraja icon. Smuggled out of India in 1976, this icon reached the British museum for cleaning, where it was established that the Nataraja was a stolen art object. In the ensuing court case, Siva acted as plaintiff with the Indian government serving only as ‘technical plaintiff.’ Siva here was a juristic person and, as it turns out, a juristic agent, who could own property and seek its lawful return when expropriated. The distinction between person and property could not be sustained. 17. Situated in the precincts of the Mosque, the Ram Chabutra was an elevated platform. It marked the exact spot of the janmasthan. 18. The rules of evidence marshaled to support the view that the Rama deity and his birthplace were jural entities were again derived from eclectic sources—various translations of Valmiki’s Ramayana, the Skandapurana, the 1875 Ayodhya Mahatmya, Edward Thornton’s Gazetteer of 1858, Carnegie’s report of 1870, the Imperial Gazetteer of 1905 and Neville’s Fyzabad Gazetteer of 1905, the New Encyclopedia Britannica, Vol. IX and so on. 19. On the night of 21–22 December 1949, the deities of Ram Lala and his brothers, Lakshmana, Shatrughan and Bharata, were surreptitiously installed inside the central dome of the Babri Mosque. Following the installation, the mosque ceased to function as a site of Islamic prayers. Instead Hindus were allowed darshan from a distance. Effectively, the Babri Mosque lost its character as a place of worship from that date. 20. The Ram Chabutra, apparently marking the exact spot where Rama took birth, was an elevated platform located next to the actual mosque. It, too, was demolished in 1992.

ABSTRACTS

This paper studies the predicates associated with the name of the Hindu god Rama, as they come to inhabit the temple town of Ayodhya. My intention is to show how the name Rama is linked to the topography of Ayodhya, but also to a landscape that is marked by the absence of the Babri Mosque, demolished by members of the Hindu right in 1992. The name Rama imagines Ayodhya to be both a pastoral setting and a site of national regeneration. This is achieved by coupling the architectural spaces of Ayodhya to the many names of Rama, and to his kingdom. I suggest that the Rama deity, installed in the place of the mosque, acquires life in this combination.

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INDEX

Keywords: Rama, Ayodhya, Babri Masjid, haunting, legal personality of the deity

AUTHOR

DEEPAK MEHTA

Professor, Department of Sociology, Shiv Nadar University, Greater Noida, UP

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Secularism’s Names: Commitment to Confusion and the Pedagogy of the Name

Jacob Copeman

AUTHOR'S NOTE

I am grateful to the contributors to this special issue, especially Veena Das, as well as audiences in London, Göttingen and Madison for valuable suggestions. I owe much to Nathaniel Roberts, Dwaipayan Banerjee, Diego Malara, Matjaz Vidmar, Aya Ikegame, Arkotong Longkumer and the anonymous journal reviewers for their comments and suggestions on earlier drafts of this article, and to Prasannanshu, Johannes Quack, Patricia Jeffery, Hugo Gorringe, Hannah Lesshafft and Neeti Nair for fruitful conversations. Research and writing for this special issue was made possible by an Independent Social Research Foundation Early Career Fellowship. We have been clueless over the fact that why did SRK [Bollywood superstar Shahrukh Khan] choose to write his son AbRam’s name in such a different manner and here’s what the actor has explained. ‘His name is based on a variation of Prophet Abraham. And I liked the connotation that it’s…a secular name. We are a Hindu-Muslim family… and I want my children to grow up without any difference of opinion in the name. It’s nice this way and has more universal appeal’ [...] Shahrukh Khan already has two kids with wife Gauri Khan. His son named Aryan Khan is 15 years old, while his daughter Suhana is 12 years

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old. (Filmibeat, 21 August 2013) In [Martin Amis’s] book, Experience, he describes asking his father what it’s like to be anti-Semitic: ‘If I’m watching the end of some new arts programme I might notice the Jewish names in the credits and think, Ah, there’s another one. Or: Oh I see. There’s another one,’ Amis Sr. replies. (The Guardian, 7 November 2014)

Introduction: anti-algorithm

1 It is a truism that a person’s name is liable to convey a good deal of information about them. Conventional rules tied to the names ‘Gurpreet’ and ‘Muhammad’ ensure that when someone sees or hears those names, they will probably assume that they designate individuals from, respectively, Sikh and Muslim backgrounds. Personal names, indeed, come with considerable demographic baggage (Alter 2013: 13), frequently acting as key vehicles for the automatic categorization of their bearers and the noticing of the category before the person (as seen in the quote from the Guardian newspaper in one of the epigraphs above).

2 This is as true in South Asia as it is elsewhere where ‘the two (or more) names of an individual are expected to reflect without ambiguity, the gender, caste and religion of that individual’ (Banerjee 2008: xiv). The assumption of a correlation between personal name and caste and/or religion has led to a variety of attempts to harness the information conveyed in South Asian names for governmental and biopolitical ends that for some will contain echoes of the colonial project of ‘control by classification’ (Ingold 2011: 174). Consider the development by UK epidemiologists of name- recognition algorithms to identify not only British South Asians but the regional, linguistic and ethnic subgroups within this larger category—the stated purpose being to supplement existing datasets used in research on ethnic variations in health with more accurate information on subjects’ ethnicity (Cummins et al. 1999, Nanchahal et al. 2001). Most recently, political anthropologist Raphael Susewind (2014) has explored the potential of an open-source algorithm’s use of local name registers in Uttar Pradesh to provide ‘probabilistic inference of religious community.’ The explicit aim is to provide insights into, and ameliorative policies in respect of, group-based inequality. Since (again) adequate datasets on religious communities do not exist, the algorithm is seen to ‘provide […] a workaround by probabilistically exploiting the communal connotations of names; it transforms name lists—which are readily available—into a new source of demographic data’ (Susewind 2014: 1). 3 It is important to be clear that the algorithms referred to are not, and could never be, 100% accurate, and to be fair no one is proposing they ever could be. As Susewind (2014: 3) is careful to point out, names do not ineludibly reflect religious background or ethnicity (see also Stewart 2000: 51). Quite apart from boundary-crossing names such as those used by the north Indian Meo community (e.g. Ram Khan, Shankar Khan), which are irreducible to the religious either/or that such algorithms demand (not unlike the colonial state’s requirement of binary legibility), surname-titles such as ‘Chaudhary’

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may belong to a Hindu, Muslim or another community besides, and a variety of ‘neutral’ obfuscators exist, such as Kumar and Singh, that usually are not caste-specific, 1 while a caste surname that strongly signifies a particular community in one region of the country is liable to signify a different one elsewhere (e.g. Nayak). 4 Nevertheless, and putting to one side for the moment ethical questions raised by such endeavours, the logic informing the algorithms remains powerful—personal names usually do provide telling insights into the community backgrounds of their bearers, and answers to the everyday question ‘What is your name?’ are perpetually fed into a kind of social algorithm for the calculation of identity, in a corridor, on a train, in a store, on the phone, or wherever. But what if South Asian names ceased to be capable of providing such ‘data’—and in fact served to scramble any attempt at automatic categorization? It is that question that this essay explores. There are of course numerous ways in which persons convey demographic baggage other than through their names—‘some information is always evident in face-to-face interaction, because we are all ambulatory autobiographies continuously and unavoidably emitting data for others’ senses and machines’ (Marx 1999: 101)—but as Goffman (1963: 76) pointed out, of all the markers of identity personal names are perhaps ‘the easiest to tamper with.’ 5 The essay is grounded in on-going ethnographic work amongst committed proponents of secularism in India, namely rationalist, humanist, and atheist organisations and their members,2 but it also explores allied attempts to ‘secularise’ names made by people and institutions that would not identify as rationalist but certainly would describe themselves as secular. What I call ‘secular names’ are, by and large, names that have been ‘tampered with’ through acts of renaming to downplay or extinguish demographic (i.e. caste and religious) markers that at the same time are also, of course, markers of belonging. Renaming, here, may refer to an activist’s self-renaming, or to the naming of his or her child in ways that do not accord with convention. M.N. Srinivas’s (2012: 335–6) use of the term ‘secular names’ is similar but different to mine. He employed it to refer to a move amongst Karnataka’s urban elites away from naming children after deities. Yet among the examples he gives are Ashok, Sanjay and , names which, because of their Sanskrit origin, continue to encode their bearers’ Hindu backgrounds, regardless of their not being the names of Hindu gods. In some cases, amongst secular activists, this is where their attempts to employ a secular name end. However, I include in my definition of secular naming practices more radical and diverse attempts to onomastically cloak a person’s religious and/or caste background, as we shall see. 6 Some secular names carry an explicitly pedagogical message, part of their purpose being to encourage reflection upon their own nature and, via that, a person on their worldview. Names that withhold the information usually associated with them, in calling attention to themselves, may provoke reflection on the arbitrariness, changeability, and role of names in forming the very community distinctions they signify. That is not to say they always succeed in this, but rather to suggest that this is where some users of such names locate the value in them. I shall thus employ the term ‘meta-name’ to call attention to the pedagogy of the name in certain instances of secular onomastic experimentation. 7 I identify two main strategies used by activists for the production of ‘secular names’: purification of the caste and religious connotations of names, and multiplication of those connotations in the giving of boundary-crossing names. At certain points the

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strategies overlap; but I see heuristic value in retaining the distinction for the time being. Common to each is a rationale that seeks to break the association between name and pigeonholed identity, an association that it is important to recognise is itself the product of diverse procedures by which group boundaries were solidified both by their interactions with the state and with various kinds of reform movements, caste associations, and other mechanisms for removing any ambiguity with regard to the straightforward identification of name with the social group (see Das & Copeman this issue, Steinberg this issue). We might say that if prior deeds of purification operated according to a logic of either/or, the two strategies pursued by activists operate according to logics of, one the one hand, both/and (boundary-crossing names), and on the other, neither/nor (purified names). The two strategies demonstrate the extent to which naming has become subject to experimentation amongst rationalists and secular activists. Though I do not claim that all or even a majority of activists engage in such onomastic experimentation, every rationalist is able to point to examples from within their circle of activism, and there are rationalist associations where naming innovations are absolutely normal and indeed required. For Punjab’s dynamic and influential Tarksheel organisation, for instance, dropping one’s caste surname is a condition of membership. 8 Before turning to the specific strategies employed, it is important first to be clear about why they are experimenting thus. I suggest there are three principal reasons. First, they take up a position that sees the inescapable associations and automatic categorization of personal names as leading directly to the circumscription of human possibility. For Bourdieu (1991: 121), names ‘inaugurate the actor’s identity and inform him in an authoritative manner of what he is and what he must be,’ and this can equally describe the rationalists’ view. Rationalist activists seek to circumvent the ought self imposed on a person by their name; to liberate themselves and others from its shackles. Second, there is the matter of demonstrating consistency. Anti-caste activism is folded into the Indian rationalist worldview. Famous for their anti- superstition and miracle demonstration campaigns, activists frequently describe caste as the biggest superstition of all. Retention of a caste surname leaves activists open to charges of hypocrisy, similar to the recent accusations levelled at Arundhati Roy who, after the publication of her new introduction to B.R. Ambedkar’s The Annihilation of Caste, was challenged on her continued use of a caste surname. 9 Third, and most important, is activists’ acute recognition of the role of names in facilitating multiple forms of discrimination. The by now classic study by economists Bertrand and Mullainathan (2004), which revealed the dramatic extent to which employers in Boston and Chicago discriminate against equally qualified candidates based solely on whether their names are typically ‘white’ or ‘black,’ was recently replicated for a variety of Indian metropolitan contexts to revealing effect. Thorat and Attewell’s (2010) study entailed responding to private sector job adverts with CVs demonstrating equal qualifications, but with names indicative of a number of different caste and religious backgrounds. While the finding that applicants with discernibly Dalit, low caste or Muslim-sounding names were far less likely than those with high caste ones to hear back from employers will probably surprise few social scientists, the research is valuable for vividly crystallising the socio-economic stakes of personal names in the region, and for providing a compelling counter to illusory rhetoric that celebrates the supposed ‘post-caste’ egalitarianism of the liberalised economy. The demographic baggage of names, then, plays a key role in everyday discrimination, from

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the notorious difficulties faced by people with low-caste or Islamic names in finding properties for rent, to obtaining jobs, and so on. 10 Activists’ onomastic experiments are thus addressed to a specific set of problems. In his reflections on Dewey and Foucault’s differing approaches to problems as a topic of enquiry, Rabinow (2006: 42–3) notes that the former’s emphasis is on identification and rectification of problems, while the latter’s ‘problematisation’ is oriented towards understanding how different responses to a problem are ‘simultaneously possible.’ Elements of both perspectives inhere in activists’ strategies and in my account of them. With Dewey, activists seek to ‘clarify and realign a problematic situation’ (Rabinow 2006: 42). With Foucault I seek to understand the problematic dissonances between the different attempts made to realign the problem, and how addressing the problem can create a set of new ones. Thus, while the first part of the paper identifies the differing onomastic strategies employed by activists to attend to the problem of names and automatic categorization, the latter sections show how the proffered solutions constitute themselves another field of problems. Acts of renaming, and non-normative names as such, can be and are contested. Performative utterances, if they are not enacted in ordinary circumstances but, for instance, on the stage, out of earshot, or in a language the hearer does not understand, will be simply ‘hollow or void’ (Austin 1962: 22), and secular naming practices by their very nature are extraordinary—this is how they gain their power but it also leaves them open to being ignored, ridiculed or classed as illegitimate, especially by those who would police community boundaries. As an archetypal Status Function Declaration—an act that makes something the case by representing it as being the case—naming is a function that can be performed ‘only in virtue of the fact that there is a recognised status of the object or the person that performs the function’ (Searle 2015: 145), and it is just such a status that may be lacking in cases of secular (re)naming, as we shall see. Such a focus on debates and criticisms both within and outside the movement about the worth and validity of particular naming strategies is key for clarifying what is at stake in the domain of secular naming practices.

Prior innovations

11 It is important to be clear that present-day secularists are far from being the first or only individuals to identify the name as a problem or to mark it as an explicit matter of concern and questioning.3 What we might call ‘transcategorial onomastics’ 4—an onomastics to dethrone the algorithm, so to speak—is both varied and longstanding, from Guru Gobind Singh’s hailing of three Shudras, a Brahmin and a Kshatriya as ‘Singhs’5 in forming the Sikh khalsa (Cunningham 1849: 70), to present-day deaf Indians’ disavowal of caste or religious monikers in favour of ones denoting a particular bodily feature (Friedner n.d.; cf. Steinberg this issue), from the use of generics such as ‘Kumar’6 to characters in twentieth-century Hindi novels going by single names only as a means of facilitating identification with them whatever the reader’s background [Gold 2015]), and similarly the preponderance of characters in Hindi film who have been ‘surnameless and thus regionless, casteless, ethnically non-identifiable, and [in Nandy’s opinion at least] ultimately ahistorical’ (Nandy cited in Charkavarty 1993: 200).

12 Yet such alleged ahistoricism I would suggest is very historically situated indeed—it is no coincidence that the surnameless characters in Hindi fiction and films are coeval

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with an era of patriotic nation-building in which caste and religious differences were downplayed in many circumstances in favour of pan-Indian generics. This could take the form of suppression of caste identifiers as in the case of the maternal uncle of a middle-aged teacher friend of mine in Delhi who, a communist party member, had in the 1960s given up the caste surname Gupta and adopted Bharti (Indian) ‘because he wanted a casteless society,’ or of nationalist boundary-crossing names as in the famous case of revolutionary fighter Udham Singh who, when arrested for the murder of Michael O’Dwyer, who had been lieutenant-governor of the Punjab in 1919 when the Jalianwala Bagh massacre took place, gave the boundary-crossing nationalist name Ram Mohammad Singh Azad, ‘a name that invoked the three major religious communities of the Punjab—Hindu, Muslim, and Sikh—as well as his anticolonial sentiment (azad means “free”)’ (Mir 2010: 2–3). 13 In present times, Dalit migrants to the city may, for obvious reasons, take the opportunity migration affords to discard surnames that are often stigmatising (see Paik 2011: 236, Pandey 2013)—a practice that remains controversial both within and outside Dalit communities.7 Though many Dalits actively retain stigmatising caste surnames as acts of assertion and positive revaluation, Dalit and rationalist naming practices frequently overlap, sharing what might be termed a commitment to confusion. A north Delhi-based Dalit activist who uses a single name only—leaving a question mark where the usual caste title surname would be—put it to me like this: through naming practices such as his there will be ‘So, so much confusion. Then the whole thing [that is, caste discrimination] will go away.’ The expression he used was the Urdu ‘ghaflat ho gayi.’ Though in the following quotation—from a Christian Dalit acquaintance who retains his Christian forename having changed his surname to a perfectly ambiguous Hindu one that connotes different castes in different regions—the Hindi expression used was bhram: ‘Some think I am Brahmin, some Kshatriya, some OBC, some Hindu, and those who know me know I am a Christian. It is good to confuse people. The upper castes have been befooling (bevakuf bana rahe hain) SCs for centuries, so if they are confused by the new Shuklas and Sharmas [i.e. Dalits taking on upper caste names] that is good’ (emphasis added). 14 The intentional production of categorical uncertainty by way of experimental onomastics is thus not the preserve of rationalist activists. Much more could be said on the matter of a wider transcategorial onomastics not specific to rationalist activists, and its class basis—for instance, the kind of boundary-crossing names employed by upwardly mobile urban parents that signifies their sophisticated cosmopolitanism. The glossy Mumbai-based Mother and Baby magazine presents interviews with ‘society’ figures who do exactly this—Muslim actors whose new-born babies bear Hindu or Christian names and vice versa—and its founder-editor Priya Pathiyan told me about Hindu Sindhi friends of hers who live in south Delhi whose new-born they named Zyaan: global citizens, ‘they are comfortable giving their baby a name that has roots in Arabic, ignoring older family members who ask “why a Muslim name?”’8 Contemporary secular naming practices sometimes reflect both this class dimension (many—though certainly not all—activists belong to ‘respectable’ professions such as medicine and academia) and that of nationalism—for instance, the son of a Punjabi rationalist leader is named Vishav Bharti (World Indian), and I shall describe similar instances of boundary-crossing names to that of Udham Singh below—which begs the question: are their naming acts mere remnants of a waning Nehruvian-era nationalist identity (i.e. a kind of onomastic ‘national integration’)? Is there anything vital or ‘contemporary’

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about them or are such names teetering objects of nostalgia—without import in the so- called ‘new India’? 15 The question becomes more pressing still in light of the way in which the politics of unrecognition, or reverse identity politics, I am concerned with here would seem quite at odds with the post Indian nationalist tendency toward differentiation as identified in a plethora of influential works from V.S. Naipaul’s A Million Mutinies Now (1990) to Jaffrelot’s The Silent Revolution (2003). The latter work charts the rise of caste-based political formations in the country consequent on the years preceding the 1975–77 Emergency when the Congress’s populist goals ‘had come to be expressed in terms which […] signalled the importance of jati and varna [i.e. caste] classifications to anyone who could be thought of as wronged or deprived’ (Bayly 1999: 285, see also Kapila 2008). My suggestion is that it is precisely because the dominant analytical narrative has focused on heightenings of difference that we should take seriously secular naming innovations as containing the possibility of delineating a countervailing trend towards more broad-based national or non-particularising identities—a trend that risks neglect given the existing scholarly emphasis on differentiated particularities. It is not just that a transcategorial imaginary still exists, but that it is evolving in new and interesting ways and onomastics are at its heart. 16 There is a further reason we should pay attention here. Activists’ rationalism is frequently dismissed as ‘the basis of hypocritical scorn for the less well educated and their superstitions’ (Feuchtwang 2013: 86), with activists themselves accused of being nothing other than Macauley’s grandchildren (a stance shared by the Hindu right and many scholars [Quack 2012b]). The material presented here allows us to progress beyond such stereotypes. The colonial regime—whose mantle activists are said to have inherited—famously inaugurated the governmentalisation of difference with massive continuing ramifications to this day, and scholars have been active in pointing out the role of enumeration in formalizing what had previously been ‘fuzzy’ communities (Kaviraj 1989) and how the competition between these newly identifiable interest groups resulted in a direct and singular equation between enumeration on the one hand and reification and fissiparity on the other. The reverse identity politics of ‘Macauley’s grandchildren’ is therefore of note. In their politics of unrecognition we might discern an onomastic method of hope (Miyazaki 2004), or prefigurative (Graeber 2002) politics of the name. Omvedt, in 2010, wrote movingly of ‘Waiting for an India when caste names will have lost their meaning’: ‘Perhaps [such] names might remain—after all, the US and England have Smiths, Carpenters, Potters—but in India, as there, no one would remember that they mean anything.’ The activists discussed here refuse to wait. Seeking to produce the transcategorial in specific local instances, activists prefigure and foreshadow a future they simultaneously help to bring into being—a prefigurative politics of the name.

Strategy 1

17 The first strategy I term purificatory. It seeks to remove caste and religious connotations from the names activists themselves bear or that they give to their children. Omvedt (2010), as just noted, hopes that the caste connotations of many Indian surnames will be forgotten and become what Jullian (cited in Wilson 1998) in

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1919 called ‘sterilized words.’ Activists, however, seek to accelerate the process of onomastic sterilization through active removal of such connotations.

18 Given their anti-caste convictions it is unsurprising that the removal of caste surnames is a common practice amongst them. Sometimes, as was mentioned earlier, dropping a caste surname is a condition of membership of local rationalist organizations. Activists may dispense with a surname altogether, use their place of origin as a (toponymic) surname, or adopt a ‘place-holder’ name such as Kumar or Singh. The founder of Tarksheel, the main Punjab rationalist society, changed his surname from Mittal, a caste title, to Mitter, meaning friend, a technique that retains an aural memory of the disavowed, ideologically unsound name (see Paik [2011: 236] on Dalit versions of this onomastic move and Mehta [this issue] on the spectrality of proper names). 19 Krishnan, an activist from central India, insisted to me that ‘We should not expose religion in [our children’s] names… Though I am from a Hindu background, I am not a Hindu—only a human being. My wife, who is also an activist, is from a Christian background, but she is not a Christian. We thought about it carefully and we called our elder son Lyric, and our younger son is called Sonnet.’ 20 The use of English words as names allows parents to avoid an association with Sanskrit- derived names, for even if a Sanskrit name has no explicit religious reference point (e.g. unlike, for instance, the father’s name Krishnan), the Hindu background of a person may be gauged by its Sanskrit origin (as with, for instance, Akash [sky]—not an explicitly ‘religious’ name but nonetheless typically revealing its bearer to be Hindu, or perhaps Jain or Sikh). This is similar to the situation of Muslims in Tamil Nadu: it is not that they do not see themselves as Tamils yet the association between Tamil and Hinduism causes them to choose non-Tamil names (Britto 1986). The drawback of this strategy, for secular-rationalist activists, is that it is at odds with their attempts to emphasise that their project is one deeply embedded in Indian history as a counter to the Hindu right (and indeed scholarly) charge that they are inheritors of the colonial mantle. However, if the words are themselves ‘un-Indian,’ use of the related words Lyric and Sonnet does reflect the not uncommon north Indian practice of naming siblings in poetically similar ways, as in, for instance, calling three brothers Rachin, Sachin and Nitin. 21 Families associated with Vijayawada’s Atheist Centre,9 provide further examples of the method of onomastic purification. This is what its literature has to say about rationalist naming practices: Birth of a child, irrespective of gender, is a happy occasion for atheists and they share joy with others. They name their children as per the events in history, current and international affairs, social and political changes or reflecting the beauty of nature. In order to break the barriers of caste and religion, atheists name their children in a secular manner, connoting a meaning relevant to the time or an event which has no religious connotation. Taking the case of children in Atheist Centre, Samaram (II World War), Niyanta (dictator), Lavanam (Salt, was born on the eve of Gandhi’s Salt Satyagraha), Vijayam (Victory. First success of Congress in General Elections), Vidya (Education) and the younger generation with unique names such as Sanketh (Information), Vidwat (Knowledge), Saujas (Redoubled Vigour and Youthfulness), Saaras & Tejas (Indigenous manned aeroplanes developed by India), Olos (Olympics Los Angeles) to mention a few. Many atheists are making the next generation secular and post religious. Atheists also stress on the need for birth registration, which is neglected in India. When they admit their

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children in educational institutions, in the application forms they mention in the caste and religion column as ‘nil’ (Vijayam n.d.). 22 The examples provided here of names intended to ‘break the barriers of caste and religion’ are both international and national(ist) in outlook, with references to the Second World War, the Los Angeles Olympic Games, Gandhi’s salt march and the development of ‘indigenous’ airplanes. Replacing caste and religious connotations with nationalist ones is a well-worn integrative move—it recalls, for instance, the ‘Meri Jaati Hindustani’ (My Caste is Indian) movement, which encourages Indians to write ‘Hindustani’ as their caste at census time,10 and the very publicly visible use of ‘Bharti’ and ‘Swaraj’ as nationalist surnames. And as with Lyric and Sonnet, the pattern of naming enacted here is simultaneously innovative and conventional: Olos, for instance, is certainly unique, yet follows the classic Indian template of context-sensitive (Ramanujan 1989) naming, wherein children are named after the day on which they were born (Itvari, Manglu etc.) and former Bihar Chief Minister Laloo Prasad Yadav and his wife Babri ‘named their first daughter Misa after the 1973 Maintenance of Internal Security Act that [Indira] Gandhi used to quell all opposition during the Emergency’ (Cohen 2008: 36). These, then, are attempts—partial but meaningful—at onomastic purification; secular innovations that nonetheless emerge from and reflect existing naming conventions.11

23 There are multiple ways in which rationalists across time and space have sought to purify selves, spaces and events of religious iconography—in present-day England, for instance, ‘the first thing that a [Humanist] celebrant does, when he or she arrives at the chapel [to conduct a ], is take away or have covered any religious symbols that may be present’ (Engelke 2015a: 39)—and the giving of names that seek to avoid religious connotations is on the face of it an onomastic variant of the practice. Moreover, onomastic purification can take many different forms and arise from quite different motivations. Restricting ourselves to South Asia, there is the case of the Viduthalai Ciruthaigal Katchi (VCK—Liberation Panther Party)—the largest Dalit movement in Tamil Nadu—whose embrace of Tamil nationalism has involved a mass campaign to de-Sanskritise personal names (Roberts 2010, see also Ramaswamy 1997), while Pakistan is seeing an increasingly purist attitude towards Islamic naming, with Wahabi-influenced moves to ban , names determined by numerology and even names ‘implying that the prophet or saints bestow a child’ (Rahman 2013: 47). While some of this logic is no doubt exhibited in the case of Indian rationalists who in other contexts certainly make it their business to expunge religious symbolism, a critical difference is that in this case purification concerns less a move toward secular or rationalist piety or virtue than a move towards productive not-knowing and disidentification. Use of the term ‘purification’ here must therefore be nuanced. Unlike the Hindu social worker in Steinberg’s essay (this issue) who removes Azeez from the child runaway Akhil-Azeez’s hitherto ambiguous and situationally changeable name because ‘she did not want to give him a Muslim name,’ and schoolteachers in the Sunderbans who similarly Hinduise the Islamic inflections of pupils’ ambiguous boundary-crossing names in class registers (Jalais 2009: 56), the strategy in this case is not one of either/or, or even both/and, but neither/nor. Which is to say that here purification and commitment to confusion go together, with purification not aimed at narrowing down to a singular association (such as Tamil) but at the removal of all associations.

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24 Since this is purification in the service of an ‘open’ name—open in the sense of seeking to pre-empt the way in which a name can pre-empt identity; keeping a child’s options ‘open’ so to speak—this is indeed a very particular kind of purification. Das (this issue) refers to the ‘open texture’ of certain names and of names ‘pregnant with future possibilities,’ and the purified names given by rationalists similarly are an attempt to keep open a child’s future possibilities. 25 Rationalists sometimes say that purified surnames such as No-caste are intended to provoke surprise and reflection on the part of hearers—‘to make people think’ as several activists put it to me—so we might say that they are a species of meta-name (indirectly pedagogical names meant to provoke reflection about the conventions of naming). It is difficult to gauge whether this intention is often, or even ever, fulfilled, but recognition of the intention is important in itself, and I can attest to the surprise they can generate. But there is a problem. Activists who do not go the route of purified names do not so much disapprove of such names as simply point out that many of them would be listed in Indian baby name books unambiguously under the ‘Hindu’ section.12 Consider the names Vikas (development), given since the boy was born during the First World Atheist Conference in 1972 which aimed to spread secular and atheist thought, and Sahasra (a new beginning), given in connection with the Arab Spring and what seemed then to be the burgeoning spirit of democracy in the Arab world. While they do not disclose the person’s caste or necessarily refer to gods or Hindu concepts, their Sanskrit-derivation means they are nonetheless strongly indicative of this tradition. Activists work toward a function of names correlative with Mill’s (1843) sense of them as being ‘meaningless marks set upon things [or persons] to distinguish them from one another,’ which is not to say that the name has no lexical meaning but that ‘whatever lexical meaning it may have had, or still retains, does not interfere with its denotative function’ (Nicolaisen 1978: 42). The problem of course is that particular communities are frequently associated with particular languages, whatever the lexical meanings of the words used as names, and whether or not such an association has to some extent been formed via indigenist appropriation (Pollock 2011: 40). 26 However, a television advertisement shows one imagined solution to the problem, and I conclude this section by describing it. The ad, aired in 2008, was for the Indian mobile phone company Idea Cellular, and featured film actor Abhishek Bachchan, son of Bollywood icon Amitabh. Set in an unspecified part of rural India it depicts caste-based strife between two fictitious village communities, the Thumihars and the Purmis. Then an idea strikes. ‘The sarpanch [head] of the village, played by Abhishek […], declares that, henceforth, no one will be known as a Purmi or a Thumihar. Everyone will be known by a number. The ad goes on to show every person being known by a nine-digit number that starts with 9 and it stops the fighting in the village as people forget their caste identities.’13 27 Helpfully reminding us that present-day transcategorial fantasies are not the preserve of rationalist activists, the solution the ad proposes is to move beyond words and language; i.e. to ‘purely’ denote through use of number. Consider also the Aadhaar biometric identity card scheme in which every citizen in India is assigned a 12-digit individual identification number to serve as proof of identity. Cohen (2012a) notes that part of the promise of the number is precisely that it might produce de-territorialised identities free of biography: finger prints, eye photos and indeed numbers rather than names: freedom from identity. But of course, and for good reason, reduction to a

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number is usually seen as being precisely that—an acutely negative reduction. Prisoner tattoos in late nineteenth century India inscribed a number made up of the prisoner’s date of conviction and a serial number (Singha 2000), and there are of course many other notorious instances of reductive numeric inscription from the century after. De Certeau (2007: 162) has complained of the replacement of local street names—a world of , stories and legends that nurtures our collective memory—by numbers, just as ‘on the telephone, one no longer dials Opera, but 073.’ The expunging of stories and legends by arbitrary numeric combinations causes the city to become a ‘suspended symbolic order’ (ibid), and for de Certeau this is to be lamented. 28 However, if an onomastic symbolic order upholds a structure of discrimination and domination, it is not difficult to see why activists and those affected might actively pursue its suspension and even view substitution by numbers as a very productive reduction indeed. We need, of course, to be cautious on the question of whether number is in actual fact purely referential, while according recognition to others’ conceptions of it as such. Maurer (2003: 318) usefully questions whether ‘conversion to number’ is always and everywhere a straightforward reduction. Invoking Wittgenstein, Maurer notes ways in which numbers may take on rhetorical functions, especially in respect of their putative ‘reduction’ to equivalence (Maurer 2003: 319). Similarly, if we consider number’s reduction to equivalence a ‘form of argument’ (Maurer 2003: 319)— part of the fantasy work of money, in Maurer’s analysis—then we might understand nominative uses of number (i.e. numbers as names) as a means of producing equivalence of identities: a veritable ‘fraternization of impossibilities’ (Marx 1977: 110), but here positively valued. Numeric equivalence in names, as in money, seems to contain the possibility of ‘rendering dissimilars into species of the same’ (Maurer 2003: 332). In other words, it is precisely the connotative power of number (its rendering equivalent) that allows it to be mobilised as a fantasy of pure denotation.

Strategy 2

29 We now turn from number as name to number of names, and the multiplication of associations consequent on the strategy of boundary crossing. If rationalists’ strategy of onomastic purification possesses a logic of neither/nor, or disidentification, the logic of the strategy of boundary-crossing names is that of both/and, or multiplied identification. Both strategies aim for a kind of categorial undecideability (Derrida 1988: 116), with activists seeking to denature (or problematise) conventional classifications in accordance with their ideal of human flourishing beyond categories. But as we shall see, the second strategy, like the first, raises several problems.

30 While many Christian-origin rationalists belong to secular and rationalist organisations in the south and Muslim-origin activists have been central in the twentieth-century history of the rationalist movement, most activists I met were from Hindu or Sikh backgrounds, and it was notable how many of them gave their children recognisably Islamic names. Medical doctor Narendra Dabholkar, the founder of the main rationalist society in Maharashtra and staunch secular campaigner whose murder in 2013 was internationally reported, gave his son the Islamic name Hamid—probably in honour of Hamid Dalwai, who in 1977 founded the Indian Secular Society (Quack 2012b: 101). Of a saraswat Brahmin background, Narendra Dabholkar had already replaced his original caste title surname with one indicating his place of origin. His son’s name, then, was

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doubly transcategorial. Dabholkar’s fellow Maharashtrian rationalist and Marathi film actor gave his son the Islamic name Tanveer, while Kalanathan, a Keralan activist, and his wife, named their son Shameel. As Kalanathan put it to me, ‘I was born as a Hindu but I am not a Hindu—I am a human. I want to make a confusion so they can’t identify a person’s religion by their name. Only then will it go away. I say to [my son], use both names—[Hindu] Kalanathan as well as [Islamic] Shameel.14 Then no- one will know what you are, everyone will be confused.’ 31 As was noted above, there are places, times and communities in which boundary- crossing names are quite conventional and do not form statements of secularism or participate in a project to problematise conventional categories. The intentional hybridity (Marsland 2007) of the secular boundary-crossing name is consequent on prior deeds of purification that constitute this brand of secular naming as the act of bringing the separated categories into relation (see Maurer 2003). My sense, from travelling with activists from town to town in Bihar, Karnataka and Maharashtra on science education campaigns, is that boundary-crossing names have a higher capacity than purified names to surprise those who encounter them. In this recombinatory onomastics surprise is produced through unexpected juxtaposition. If surprise is often an occasion for generating new concepts (Street & Copeman 2014: 13, 18), here it is a technique for disrupting older ones. In this sense, the capacity of boundary-crossing names to enact a ‘pedagogy of the name’ is more pronounced than those characteristic of strategy 1. In part this is because rationalists share the latter strategy with many non-rationalists who practice it for other (most commonly caste-obviating) reasons, whereas boundary- crossing names are more particular to rationalists. Similarly, though a significant minority of activists has adopted boundary-crossing names for either themselves or their children, such names are not as frequently used as purified ones. 32 Though the logics informing them overlap, there are obvious tensions between the two strategies considered thus far. In particular, purifiers may be disparaging about the boundary-crossing strategy of naming in such a way that retains religious connotations. As one Punjabi activist put it to me, ‘Changing one to another religious name is not a solution to the problem.’ Such naming practices might produce helpful confusion but they do not move one away from ‘religion’ per se. The purifiers, as we know, seek out names without religious connotations, though boundary-crossers are quick to point out that they rarely achieve this. Sahasra, as we have seen, may not refer explicitly to a religious concept, but is categorised as a Hindu name in Indian baby name guides. The two strategies seem to reflect a tension between varieties of secularism: Purified names seem to reflect onomastically the separatist agenda of rationalist umbrella organization the Federation of Indian Rationalist Associations (FIRA) which campaigns on a national level for a stricter separation between state and religion. On the other hand, boundary-crossing names would seem to reflect the ‘other’ secularism—the accommodative, liberal pluralist one still widely viewed as having its roots in ‘Hindu tolerance’ (see Smith 1963) and whose three salient principles have been described as: ‘religious freedom, celebratory neutrality and reformatory justice’ (Dhavan 1999: 48). 33 Indeed, the two strategies do, I think, reflect wider tensions in the interpretation and implementation of ‘secularism’ both within and outside the rationalist fold. But for such a claim to be satisfactory it requires qualification. An analytic of ‘reflection’ does not do justice to the intentions of namers for the names they give to produce effects in

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the world. The transcategorialism of secular names is meant to transform the world (dethrone the algorithm) rather than simply reflect abstract rival doctrines of political thought. Such names do represent two key ways of conceptualizing secularism, but they are also acts of definition in Holbraad’s (2012: xxiii) sense. 34 Such a sense of the capacity of names to produce effects in the world marks the act of naming as the staging of an intervention. Rationalist uses of boundary-crossing names define a space where the rather abstract political precepts of accommodative liberal pluralism meet the everyday intimacy of domestic usage, in which a name’s repetition seems at once to dilute and concentrate its associations, which is to say that such repetition makes those associations ordinary (at least according to the namer’s intentions). Naming, in such instances, can arise from an intention of making a relation to the other ordinary, or be informed by reflection on ‘the notion of the possibility of being in the place where the Other is’ (Duranti 2010: 16). So again, secular names do not simply reflect an ideology but are designed to iteratively produce a particular kind of intersubjective sensibility. Consider the case described by Banerjee (2008: iv) of Hindu parents giving their child an Islamic name. Informing the parents’ decision was a desire to force themselves to use these names with love rather than with hate. Having themselves been profoundly affected by communal violence, the parents named their child in a way that served as a prophylactic against the lure of othering. Here the pedagogy of the name is directed as much at the name-giver as a reminder (an onomastic ‘note to self’) as it is to strangers, and differs from the meta-name in operating through repetition rather than through calling attention to itself as a name (though boundary-crossing names can do this, too, as we have seen). The Hindu- background activists I know who have given Islamic or Christian names to their children, which perforce are subject to continual repetition, did so as a kind of secular technology of the self to avoid othering a community that their political opponents have no compunction about de-humanizing and as recognition of its temptation. As one activist put it to me, ‘Everyday and many times I say it. The [Islamic] name reminds us [the child’s parents]: we should not follow the media and others and scapegoat this community for votes; we’re all Indians.’ 35 It is important and necessary to recognise parents’ intentions here, and the nuanced reflections that inform their acts of naming. But what are the effects of such names? What kind of responses do such names engender? Given the Hindu provenance of most activists, one could make a case that boundary-crossing names operate (ironically) through a classical Hindu mode of laying claim to, and incorporating, otherness. We might ask: what makes the other available for incorporation in this way? What sorts of power relations inhere? Are Muslims in a position to object? I do not mean to imply that they would object if only given the chance but it is nevertheless important to acknowledge the structure of possibilities here. Hindus may happily go to a church and light candles (and this may be seen as a testament to the greatness and inclusiveness of Hinduism). But such inclusiveness also constructs religion as such in a certain way, one that may be just as dogmatic and imperial as more exclusive forms of worship.15 Are syncretic names, then, ‘code word[s] for the incorporation and assimilation of “minority” cultures into the culture of the dominant group’ (Viswanathan 1995: 21)? We need to both take seriously activists’ professed aims in employing such names— which as we have seen, primarily concern the desirability of confusion and dis-identity and of making a relation to the other ordinary—and thereby avoid reducing this onomastics to the status of mere symptom of a Hindu rationalism (which would be to

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dismiss activists’ own sense of their actions and typify what Engelke [2015b] calls a ‘gotcha’ argument), and pay heed to the possibility that this is how others may perceive such usages and to the recognition that certain kinds of (not necessarily rationalist) boundary-crossing name may indeed form part of the semiotics of an imposed ‘order of unity’ (Viswanathan 1995). Certainly, boundary-crossing names are markedly differentiated. Consider, for instance, the multiple associations of the name of contemporary north Indian guru Gurmeet Ram Rahim Singh Ji Insan—this, I suggest, is a name that enfolds; being suggestive both of the bhakti universalism his movement espouses and of the guru as embodied confluence (Das 2014a) of different religious traditions. Accusations of appropriation do form a response to the rationalist boundary-crossing name, as we shall see; however, their source is not the community that at first glance we might consider the subject of appropriation, but the Hindu right. 36 It is not a straightforward matter to discern how ‘everyday Muslims’—as if such a category were stable and meaningful across a range of disparate situations, regions and discourses (Cohen 2012b: 101)—view such uses of ‘their’ names by Hindu-background rationalists. The Muslim-background rationalists I know either shrug or applaud, which is unsurprising given their affiliation with the movement. A few themselves possess boundary-crossing names (which, notably, in several cases include a Christian first name and ‘Singh’—a generic, but with Rajput and/or Sikh connotations). In the limited instances in which I have been able to observe Muslim-strangers’ first encounters with rationalist boundary-crossing names—for instance, when signing in at a guesthouse or in conversation in a train carriage—a certain puzzlement and/or suspicion that that name is false resulted. In one case, in a busy carriage on Mumbai’s Central Line, on learning the name of the activist I was accompanying the Muslim passenger politely enquired about the rationalist’s parents: had they belonged to the nationalist movement? (Freedom fighter Udham Singh’s boundary-crossing name was referred to above, but consider also the great Bengali literary icon, Kazi Nazrul Islam, whose patriotic songs and poems advocated communal harmony. His children’s names— Krishna Mohammad, Arindam Khaled, Kazi Sabyasachi and Kazi Aniruddha—were a tapestry of Arabic and Sanskrit, Hindu and Islamic connotations).

Inter-marriage/inter-name

37 Another common response upon hearing a boundary-crossing name, from Muslims and non-Muslims alike, is to enquire—and the level of discretion here varies widely!—as to whether the bearer’s parents had a love-match (i.e. an inter-religious marriage). Mines (1998: 238) has noted that the offspring of inter-faith marriages in Tamil Nadu frequently bear boundary-crossing names reflecting the different religious backgrounds of their parents. This is also witnessed in the names borne by the children of Bollywood icon Shahrukh and Gauri Khan (see epigraph). This is an interesting case for several reasons: like the names of other offspring of ‘love-matches’ the names Aryan and Suhana Khan bear a trace of the ‘modernist’ conjugal production of the child as the joint achievement of both parents in which they see ‘novel combinations of themselves’ and an objectification of their love (Strathern 1992: 55, 78), coded onomastically here in the ‘nextness’ of names that indicate their different religious backgrounds: ‘We are a Hindu-Muslim family,’ Shahrukh Khan notes. But he also calls attention to the ‘secularism’ of the name of his most recent child: ‘I liked the

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connotation that [AbRam’s]…a secular name.’ This points towards the common understanding that all inter-faith marriages are to some degree ‘secular’ in signifying an ability to transcend conventional divisions, and it is worth noting here that most Indian rationalist organisations claim to offer financial and legal support to couples who have performed them in the face of familial opposition. The offers of assistance made by rationalist groups show their sympathy for inter-faith marriages, but of course the majority of such marriages do not arise from anything so grand as an ideological position on secularism taken up by the couple. Though less widespread than it once was, some incoming brides in north India change (or have changed for them) their forename as well as surname to mark their new circumstances. Inter-faith or - caste marriages, too, may occasion the bride changing her name to efface the boundary crossing the relationship embodied in a kind of post-hoc imposition of propriety. In light of this, we come to apprehend the critical role of the boundary-crossing name: a child’s inter-name, in making the inter-marriage explicit, retroactively causes the inter-marriage to form a secular statement. The inter-name of the ‘love-match,’ then, may be indicative of secularism in a lower key, and rationalists indeed encounter inter- faith marriages as a form of lived secularism. If and when couples, too, come to understand their own conjugal trajectories in such a way, their children’s names may signify both the complex unity of their ‘separate’ identities within the child and a kind of statement that reflects back on the ‘secularism’ of the union it emerges from.

38 Shahrukh Khan is himself extremely cognisant of the capacity of personal names to effect automatic categorisation. A recent film of his on the racial profiling of Muslims after the 9/11 attacks on New York foregrounded the highly suggestive statement, ‘My name is Khan and I am not a terrorist,’ and at an airport in New York to promote the same film, right on cue, the star was detained for questioning for two hours ‘because his name came up on a computer alert list.’16 ‘“I was really hassled—perhaps because of my name being Khan,” he said in a text message to reporters in India. “These guys just wouldn’t let me through.”’17 This episode, and the detentions that he (like so many others with Islamic names) has been subjected to before and since, adds poignancy to the name he and Gauri Khan gave to their most recent child: AbRam. A particularly innovative ‘intername’ in the way it crosses boundaries within the forename itself, and also remarkable for the public debate it generated, I want to dwell for a moment on the way in which it mobilises the figure of Abraham in reference to a Hindu god. A report titled ‘Secularism Shows in the Name of “AbRam,”’18 quotes the actor: ‘“As we all know my wife Gauri is from Hindu family and me Muslim, by this so many issues arose but we are far from those issues now. We decided that our baby’s name should show secularism so we have decided to give the name to [our] new-born baby “AbRam”. Here “Ab” stands for our Prophet “Huzoor Abraham Alai-His-Salam” and “Ram” stands for as we all know Bhagwan “Ram.”’ 39 Abraham is of course a kind of go-to figure of promise for progressive faith commentators for whom, as the root of the Abrahamic faiths, he stands for the possibility of healing and accord between the religions he ‘fathered.’ For Derrida (2007: 1–2), the ‘serial multiplicity of the “more than one [plus d’un]” inscribed itself upon the very name of Abraham,’ and it is in meditating upon the iconic progenitor’s name that he produces an analytic of ‘fidélité à plus d’un [faithfulness to more than one or: collective faithfulness]’ (Derrida 2007: 14) and of what I interpret as names that may afford hospitality. One can see the attraction for Derrida of a figure that seems quite in

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tune with his own ‘reasoned distrust toward borders and oppositional distinctions (whether conceptual or not)’ (Derrida 2007: 17). Indeed, Abraham is equated by Derrida with ‘the endurance of the undecideable’ (Derrida 2007: 17), just as the focus here has been on an onomastics of undecideability as a counter to automatic categorisation, and a hospitality extended to ‘the other in me.’ AbRam is, of course, just such an undecideable, even hospitable, name. Its audacity lies in onomastic extension of the lineage, with the ‘Ab’ brought together with ‘Ram,’ the name of a Hindu god. Thus is non-Abrahamic Hinduism integrated into an imagined Abrahamic secularism.

Disapproval

40 Mines (1998: 238) noted how children of inter-faith marriages bearing boundary- crossing names were teased by schoolteachers who ‘both disapproved [of] and were titillated by [their parents’] union,’ and activists’ children bearing this kind of name can be met with similar responses. Such names might be given with worthy transcategorial and/or pedagogical intentions, but cause those who perforce bear them some misery and embarrassment. Dabholkar’s son Hamid is said to have ‘suffered a lot in college because of his name. Everyone asked him, “What is your caste? What is your caste?”’19 While in the case referred to above in which avowedly secular parents gave a Hindu boy an Islamic name, the child later demanded to be given a new, unambiguously Hindu name due to teasing at school (Banerjee 2008). If the illocutionary force of naming acts is ‘felicitous [only] when the context is in place and our trust in conventions is secure’ (Das 2007: 178), the absence of these factors in respect of unconventional, or extraordinary, acts of naming such as these disrupts their efficacy. The boundary-crossing name is in part interventionist—intended to eventuate the disidentity it embodies—but also normative in depicting what transcategorialism ideally should be like (and as such at odds with ordinary naming conventions). But similar to philosophical writings that create a normative base for discussing what various phenomena ideally should be like, with often little attempt to account for their everyday forms (Miller 2007: 546), boundary-crossing names will sometimes not fare well within the scenes of utterance into which they are inserted. In addition to the teasing of those who bear them, there is the even blunter instrument of simply refusing to use such names. A Kolkata-based, Hindu-background activist described to me how her non-rationalist family members20 do exactly this in respect of her daughter: that is, they ignore the Islamic name given to her by her parents, having between them—and quite independently of her parents—decided on a Hindu name for her that they would use. The activist is fearful that they may even have consulted a pandit for the purpose. Since making something the case by representing or declaring it as such only succeeds if the status of the actor performing the function is to some degree collectively recognised (Searle 2010: 7), one can see why rationalist acts of naming may fail to ‘take’ in families in which the tradition is to consult a pandit rather than leave the act of naming solely with the parents.

41 Refusals to acknowledge and/or scorning of boundary-crossing names thus form one of the major problems generated by rationalists’ attempts to realign the problem of names and automatic categorisation. But the problems they face are not discrete and may overlap, which is what we find in the next illustrative example which concerns the name of the aforementioned film actor Shriram Lagoo.

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Paradoxical appropriation

42 In the early 2000s, the actor-activist ‘was harassed by the hooligans of [the] RSS who insisted that he should change his first name because Shriram is God’s name [but] he is an atheist.’21 The origins of the controversy lie in Lagoo having written a piece called ‘Retire the god’ that served as the introduction to a new book on the noted Keralan/Sri Lankan rationalist Abraham Kavoor.22 It went further than Dabholkar’s organisation was itself willing to go, at least publicly, on the question of the existence of God and the article inspired considerable public debate. Dabholkar and Lagoo then began a program they named Jagar (Knowledge Awakening) in which they staged debates across Maharashtra. Dabholkar (2001: 10) reports details of a specific confrontation between the actor and Hindu right activists that occurred immediately after a Vivek Jagar program at Sangli: Dr. Lagoo wanted to go to Mumbai by night train. We, all the organizers, were at station to see him off. The train was late. During that period we saw a group of young people rushing towards Dr. Lagoo. At first we thought that the group may be fans of Doctor who also is a famous film actor… Within no time they surrounded us and started shouting slogans like Jai [i.e. victory to] Bhavani, Jai Shivaji; Sanatan Hindu Dharm ki Jai… They started asking questions like, Why do you speak against Hindu religion?… One of them suggested that Dr. Lagoo should shout Jai Shri Ram. Dr. Lagoo was not afraid at all. He must have thought himself and with a smile on his face he said ‘Jai Shri Ram’ and after a pause added ‘Lagoo’ to it. The slogan became ‘Jai Shri Ram Lagoo.’ Even in those strenuous moments we could not help laughing. All these angry young men were confused. At that moment the train entered the platform and Dr. Lagoo boarded the train. Thus further confrontation was avoided. 43 Lagoo’s forename Shriram presents a paradox, since his use of it is at odds with both of the strategies we have considered: neither purified nor boundary-crossing, the name Shriram Lagoo unambiguously encodes its bearer’s Hindu background. No change, or renaming, has taken place to cause offence—it is his continued use of the name that seems to be the problem. (Indeed, as the foregoing examples indicate, the objects of the majority of rationalists’ naming innovations are their children, as with Lagoo’s son Tanveer). If his own name became a matter of concern due to his very public atheism, part of Lagoo’s rationale for preserving it is sentimental: ‘As a child I…was not [in] a position to oppose my parents not to give God’s name to me. They were very pious parents and as such they might have chosen the God’s name for their beloved child. They have given me name with their love and affection’ (cited in Dabholkar 2001: 10). There are also practical concerns: ‘Atheists do not like to be called by God’s name, [but] there is no simple and easy escape route for them,’ one activist told me.23 Another stated: ‘More than 10 million people have gods in their names. Some are Bhagwan or Paramatma Singh, even Ram—there are so many. But I have not chosen my name. My parents gave me my name. I became a rationalist later on in life. So how can I change it?’

44 The Hindu right activists who threatened Lagoo, however, apparently consider his mere continuing to bear a name that he did not choose for himself an active appropriation of it. From such an angle, his name may indeed be construed as boundary crossing: a rationalist, he nonetheless bears a notably Hindu name. Lévi-Strauss (1966) famously noted how ‘Some societies jealously watch over their names,’ and countless

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ethnographic examples could be given that show how names are frequently understood as items of property. Part of the problem, of course, is that Shriram is not just a Hindu- identifying name but a god’s name—and one that the Hindu right has expended a large amount of energy defending in recent decades. Moreover, in certain bhakti schools there is considerable slippage between the name and deity, with mantras inseparable from the gods whose names they speak (Wilke and Moebus 2011: 571). So as with the lesbian character Sita in the film Fire (1998) whose name was changed to Nita in response to violent Hindu right protests, ‘defence’ of the name seems to constitute defence of the god him or herself. If ‘stories told about objects of use belong to their aura’ (Das 2014b: 294), we might say that in seeking to hinder the attachment of Lagoo’s rationalist crusading to the name object he carries Hindu activists seek copyright protection of the (Hindu) name’s aura. They are seeking to manage (and contain) the name’s associations—a delimiting that mirrors rationalist activists’ own attempts to generate expulsive or purified names. 45 Notwithstanding Jaffrelot’s (2008) powerful argument concerning the learned, or instrumental, nature of Hindutva’s ‘taking offence,’ it is possible to perceive why a person with the name Shriram proclaiming the need to ‘retire the god’ might be construed as incongruous for some. Of course, as with brand names (Mazzarella, this issue), accruing improper associations is a risk built into the very existence of personal names. Just as ‘brand jacking’ demonstrates that a product is ‘never able to legislate its own intelligibility completely’ (Nakassis 2013: 121), intentionally incongruous name uses can be taken up as a form of political assertion. Consider the case of controversial right-wing Slovenian politician and former prime minister, Janez Janša, whose statement in 2007 that ‘the more there will be of us [i.e. Slovenians as opposed to immigrants] the sooner we shall reach the goal’ was responded to with ironic literalism when three Slovenian performance artists legally renamed themselves Janez Janša. The act of naming doubly performative (in Austin’s and in the artistic sense), the artists’ subsequent engagement in activities incongruous with the names they bore constituted an indirect but potent form of political critique; for example, a headline ‘Janez Janša Dances in Berlin,’ which referred to an artistic performance by one of the three artists, had a double-meaning, since it could be interpreted as the Prime Minister being servile to German interests (Janša et al. 2008).24 46 I do not claim that such a logic animated Lagoo’s retention of the name Shriram—no renaming took place, and his name is a matter of concern for Hindutva activists, not him. Yet the episode at the station in Sangli in which the actor-activist proclaimed ‘Jai Shri Ram…Lagoo’ certainly seemed to play on the gap between name and named and was evidently comical for Dabholkar and his colleagues.25 In his analysis of Bentham’s ‘auto-icon’—the philosopher’s bequeathal of his own stuffed corpse to University College, London in 1832—Collings (2000: 124) sees in the gesture a ‘delicious profanation’ and ‘a kind of sly joke against contemporary prejudice and outraged opinion’ that calls upon ‘the libidinal resources of debasement and traditional inversion rituals.’ Is there something of this wilful transgression and inversion of convention in some rationalist acts of naming? Many activists take delight in staging their weddings on inauspicious days, feasting during eclipses, and consuming substances such as meat and alcohol that in many contexts are shunned as impure. The hinted at sense of wilful transgression—not frequently present, but perhaps animating the laughter at Sangli station—is suggestive of pleasurable incongruity, and of taking possession for ironic effect in a manner that contains parallels with the case of Janez

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Janša. Rather than brand jacking, it could be termed (or, more to the point, experienced by certain Hindu right activists as) ‘name jacking.’

Conclusion

47 This paper has sought to shed light on secular naming innovations through identifying and exploring two key strategies used by rationalist activists to deactivate the automatic categorisation of the name, and their problems. The two onomastic strategies—of purification on the one hand and boundary crossing on the other—aim to achieve similar ends, but pursue different means. The focus on their problems has not been because I view the strategies as flawed or the deeply held convictions informing them as not significant, but because it affords illumination of the differentiated nature and differently weighted priorities of Indian rationalist and secular campaigning, and the manner in which problem-solving can beget new kinds of problems. I conclude by pointing to a final way in which some secular names have been considered to be problematic.

48 ‘We Indians love the renaming concept…’ This wearily sardonic remark may be found in the comments section below an online newspaper report on the efforts of an NGO in Maharashtra to rename en masse the hundreds of girls in the state who had reportedly been named by their parents Nakusa (unwanted).26 The remark takes its place in a long line of commentary—from colonial times (Cohn 1996: 125), through to the mid twentieth-century (Naipaul 1964) and beyond—that has sought to diagnose an Indian susceptibility to show and drama and preference for symbolic action over that which is substantive and effectual. The comment suggests that little will change for these rural girls as a result of their renaming: if they were unwanted before, they will likely remain so after. Similarly, when it was reported that thousands of Pakistani children were unable to access a state welfare scheme due to unknown parentage, and former president Asif Ali Zardari had offered them his own name for use in the otherwise empty father’s name box, online commenters ridiculed the gesture: ‘Can the children object?’ ‘Haven’t the kids suffered enough?’ ‘He is screwing the whole country […] he might as well lend his name to some of the children of the country that don’t have names already.’ It was ridiculed, in other words, because what these children really needed was not offered, only that which could be given without the giver giving anything up: ‘If his “kids” can get a share of his property, then why not?’ ‘Is it only name, or education and other facilities same as his own children’s […] Surely he can afford it.’27 49 This begs the question of the kind of adjacency, or hospitality, that a boundary-crossing name does and does not embody. Are they empty gestures? Does the adjacency figured in such a name pay ‘attention to the concrete specificity of the other’ (Das 2010: 377), or is the other more of an abstract, theoretical presence? I think here of the middle class blood donors I met and discussed in previous work (Copeman 2009: 170) who declaim their progressive credentials in imagining their donated blood being transfused into, and merging with, the bodies of any others. Meanwhile, they do not inter-dine, and have extremely little day-to-day contact with people belonging to communities other than their own. Rather than a concrete and complicated presence, the other is considered abstractly in absentia. Boundary-crossing names—certainly those that do not originate from within inter-faith marriages—may reflect something of this sensibility,

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but I would wish to be cautious on this point. A good number of activists do indeed marry across religious boundaries, while we have seen that boundary-crossing names are often given with an intention of making a relation to the other ordinary. I do not claim that a family’s endlessly repeated iteration of the name of the other as the name of its own is the same thing as participation in everyday networks of encounter, but that such an onomastics of recognition and non-recognition is worthy of our attention for its complex intertwining of the ordinary (enacted through a name’s everyday iteration) and the attempt to aspire to a ‘higher ideal’ through systematic disruption of an onomastic order in which a name unproblematically defines its bearer. 50 Connected to this is the matter of caste names. ‘The nationalist project,’ writes Rege (2006: 31), ‘mobilised modernity and [the] nation to make the public expression of caste illegitimate. As caste became the “other” of the modern, the modern secular Indian came to be imagined as one who publicly and politically disavowed caste.’28 And arguably the simplest way to do this is to drop the caste surname. Many examples could be offered: consider how on many Indian campuses it is politically correct for students to substitute caste surnames with generics, and also very recent headlines that have focused on popular novelist Amish’s decision to drop his caste surname, and the police force decree that all its officers must do the same, and so on.29 In the light of analyses that view such onomastic moves as part of an urban middle class strategy to stop caste coming into the public sphere and thereby having to negotiate over its own position, the question again arises as to whether purified names partake of what Dirks (2001) calls ‘the embarrassment of caste’—public denial of its significance (figured here by the absence of a caste surname) going hand in hand in the domestic sphere with persistence of caste-based marriages, and a multitude of other caste logics. Do rationalist onomastics enact a comparable covering over of the matter, a self-serving ‘abolition by denial’ (Chatterjee 2005) such that structures of discrimination are left in place but simply no longer talked about (named)? 51 The arguments of Rege (2006), Deshpande (2013) and Dirks (2001) are I think applicable to very many of the onomastic purifications engaged in by putatively secular-aligned individuals and organisations. But, again, we must be careful. Consider the criticisms, mentioned earlier, directed at campaigner-author Arundhati Roy in the wake of her new introduction to The Annihilation of Caste. Damned if she does and damned if she doesn’t, she is criticised for retaining a caste surname; yet if she were to drop it she would likely be excoriated for covering it over—abolition by denial! People can have reasons for not naming caste other than self-serving ones arising from bad faith. In the case of rationalist activists, there are several reasons why their actions are not continuous with the middle class (and upper caste) strategy of stopping caste coming into public view. First, there is the pedagogy of the name that renders it an explicit object of reflection; second, their reaching, via the name, towards categorial undecideability is explicitly a means to combat automatic categorisation and the manifold forms of discrimination consequent on this and an attempt to reclaim an ‘open texture’ of the name so that it does not pre-empt a child’s identity; and third, at its most ambitious it is a project of unravelling the knot of caste: rather than passively wait for people to forget the connotations of caste names, they enact a generative anti- mnemonics, or what might be described as a negative illocutionary force produced through a form of speech act that seeks to undo things with words.

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NOTES

1. In parts of north India they do in fact signify a caste identity. In metropolitan cities, however, they are unlikely to. 2. This research commenced in 2009 when I spent several months shadowing activists as they travelled through rural Bihar and Karnataka conducting science education and miracle debunking programmes, and is on-going. Since then I have visited rationalist associations and events in Punjab, Maharashtra, Gujarat, Tamil Nadu, Delhi and Uttar Pradesh, and the research has included attendance at one-off events (such as state- and national-level conferences and specific campaigns or protests) and regular participation in local networks (e.g. attendance of weekly meetings of a humanist society in Delhi). As with rationalist organizations globally, there is an unequal representation of the sexes in the Indian movement. Roughly, active women constitute less than a quarter of the group’s membership. The caste make-up of activists is quite diverse, but the movement’s leaders tend to hail from upper-caste and -class backgrounds. 3. The phrasing here borrows from Latour (2005). 4. Transcategoriality is a term I borrow from theologian Hick (2000) who proposes it as a substitute for ‘ineffable’, which for a number of reasons he sees as no longer being analytically useful. 5. Though arguably an act of ‘Rajputisation.’ 6. Though this status is regionally variable: it is a caste title/surname in parts of Uttar Pradesh. 7. To be explored in future work. 8. Interview, July 2013. 9. Further details on which may be found in Quack (2012a, 2012b: 89-91). 10. See Economic Times, 15 May 2010, and Deshpande’s (2013) telling analysis. 11. Numerous further examples of names given after incidents co-occurring with the birth of the child are detailed by Sharma (2005: 111-112): e.g. a child named Tito after a state visit by the former Yugoslav statesman; another, born mid-air, named Akash (sky/space); a child named Missile Singh after his parents heard explosions caused by a fire at a makeshift ammunition depot near their home in Bikaner. 12. Indeed, ‘Sahasra’ is categorized as a Hindu name on the indiaparenting.com website. 13. India Today, 16 Nov. 2008. 14. This refers to the prevalent south Indian practice of using one’s father’s name as a surname. 15. I am indebted to Nathaniel Roberts for insisting I consider this matter. 16. Telegraph. 17 Aug. 2009.

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17. Washington Post, 16 Aug. 2009. 18. http://bollybol.com/news/secularism-shows-in-the-name-of-abram-shah-rukh-khan/ 19. Interview with Prabhakar Nanawaty, June 11 2013. 20. See Quack (2012a) on tensions within the families of activists whose relatives do not share their convictions. 21. Interview with Prabhakar Nanawaty, June 11 2013. 22. On whom see Quack (2012: 96-7). 23. Interview with Prabhakar Nanawaty, June 11 2013. 24. I am grateful to Matjaz Vidmar for drawing this case to my attention. 25. Delight in inappropriateness is certainly a feature of Indian rationalist humour, and extends to names. After large-scale corruption at the Andhra Pradesh-based IT-firm Satyam was revealed in 2009 much was made of the onomastic and other alleged telling connections between the firm and the now-deceased guru Satya Sai Saba, while the astrologer Satya Devatra, the ‘Oracle of Gopur’, was rechristened Asatya (Untruth/Lie) Devatra after his oracular claims were exposed as ‘absolute nonsense.’ 26. Wall Street Journal, 20 Oct. 2011. 27. The Nation, 15 June 2011. 28. Deshpande’s (2013) important work on castelessness is also extremely relevant here, especially in underlining key differences between nationalist obviations of caste and post-Mandal recodings of such moves: ‘Now, the claim to be casteless is itself a sign—it is instantly recognisable as the unmistakable mark of upper-caste identity, because the experience of apparent castelessness has been available only to the upper castes’ (Deshpande 2010). 29. Outlook, 31 Oct. 2011. The police order encountered its own problems: ‘policemen are finding it difficult to adhere to the DGP’s “new name mantra” as they have become habitual using surnames like “Minhas sahib, Thakur sahib, Sharmaji and Khan sahib” while referring to their bosses or subordinates. They will now have to change their nameplates, badges that bear their names, that too at a time when the Centre is conducting a caste-based census’ (The Tribune, 8 July 2011).

ABSTRACTS

This essay takes up social and political questions of naming that are often ignored in studies of inequality or exclusion. What if South Asian personal names ceased to reveal demographic ‘data’ about their bearers, scrambling any attempt at automatic categorization? The focus here is on naming and/or renaming for ideological reasons, and in such ways that the identity of the bearer is deliberately blurred. Grounded in ethnographic work amongst committed proponents of secularism in India (principally rationalist, humanist, and atheist activists), the essay identifies two main strategies that activists use for the production of ‘disidentification’: purification of the caste and religious connotations of names, and multiplication of those connotations in the giving of boundary-crossing names. Common to each is a rationale that seeks to break the association between name and pigeonholed identity. However, acts of renaming, and non-normative names as such, can be and are contested. Thus, in order to clarify what is at stake in the domain of secular naming practices the essay also focuses on debates and criticisms from both within and outside it.

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INDEX

Keywords: names, India, South Asia, secularism, atheism, caste, activism, meta-names

AUTHOR

JACOB COPEMAN

School of Social and Political Science, University of Edinburgh

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Kristapurāṇa: Translating the Name of God in Early Modern Goa

Alexander Henn

1 Whether or not the name of God is translatable has been a controversial issue for a very long time.1 Egyptologist Jan Assmann cites vocabularies found in ancient Mesopotamia that list and translate names of Sumerian, Akkadian, Egyptian, and Hellenistic gods in two, three, and in some cases even four languages. ‘During the last three millennia B.C.E.—he summarizes the findings—religion appears to have been a promoter of intercultural translatability. [...] Peoples, cultures, and political systems may be sharply different. But so long as they have a religion and worship some definite and identifiable gods, they are comparable [...] because these gods must necessarily be the same as those worshipped by other peoples under different names’ (Assmann 2008: 140–1). Anthropologist Richard Burghart (1989) highlights a comparable insight from the world of Hinduism. Hinduism, he shows, is capable of integrating into its fold a wide range of theological and ritual traditions by attributing to the divine a particular translation- like quality. Brahma, Rama, and other Hindu gods, we learn, manifest themselves in multiple forms, and the Buddha is recognized as an incarnation of Vishnu. The facilitating concept behind this versatility is the idea that the essential nature of the divine is nirguṇa, formlessness that can manifest and transform itself in any form. The underlying rationales, we can see, are varying. The divine may be seen as the ideal resort of multiple meanings, or the ontic location of no meaning at all. Related presuppositions regarding the conceptualization of religious plurality also differ widely. ‘Comparative religion emerged in the West only when various religions could be compared from a non-religious (e.g. humanist) point of view. Indian religion [in contrast] is unique in that various dharmas are [...] compared from a religious point of view [...]’ (Burghart 1989: 220). These differentiations notwithstanding, it is a common understanding that the names of gods and, by extension, essential religious expressions are powerful intercultural mediators when they become part of translation or translation-like operations.

2 Intriguingly, however, the opposite statement, which argues that the name of God can never and should never be translated, is equally ancient and ubiquitous. Iamblichus,

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the Syrian Neoplatonic philosopher, and Origen, the Alexandrian Church father, both living in the third century C.E., agreed beyond all differences that there exists an intrinsic sympatheia or mystical link between name and deity that cannot be translated (Assmann 2008: 144). Although indirectly, their positions converge today with those of religious fundamentalists of various origins, for whom the name and essential word of God constitute the untranslatable essence of religious purity or Truth. Again, underlying rationales vary significantly. Political arguments construct religion as a bastion against cultural assimilation, theological reasoning claims the exclusivist knowledge of Truth, semiotic theories discuss symbolic vis-à-vis indexical modalities of ‘religious language’ (Keane 2004). The point is here not just that the name and word of God is considered untranslatable, or that translation is taken to implicate more than just lexical and sematic mediation. More critical is that the rationale for challenging and refusing the translatability of essential religious expression often lies in the refusal to recognize that there exists more than one religious truth or doctrine around the globe. 3 What I will do in this paper is scrutinize the ambiguity regarding the translatability of the name and word of God and related questions about the recognition of religious pluralism in a particular post-colonial context. Historically, this context is marked by the early-modern colonial expansion of Portuguese-Catholic forces into India and Asia, which for Christian led to the encounter with religious cultures that until then were largely unknown. These religious cultures, which at some point in history became globally known as Hinduism, and Jainism, occur in the early modern Portuguese sources still under generic and unspecific designations such as gentilismo or, with reference to the Konkan region on India’s Western coast, Concanneponni, terms that are distinctly void of any reference to religion and may be translated as ‘gentilehood’ or ‘Konkanness’ respectively. The impact of the colonial and religious encounter on Europe was enhanced and complicated by the fact that it coincided with the religious strife of the Protestant Reformation and the sectarian division of Christianity into Catholics and Protestants. This revolutionary upheaval led Christian Europe to an ambivalent and, to some extent, even contradictory attitude vis-à-vis the Gentiles of India and other regions of the world. On the one hand, the Protestant reformation and its Catholic response revived an age-old theological animosity against religious images and led to aggressive accusations and attacks against the gentiles for their alleged ‘idolatry’ or image worship.2 ‘Idolater’ became a synonym for ‘pagan’ worldwide in the European Christian sources. On the other hand, the upsetting experience of the sectarian division of Christianity in Europe and the startling encounter with unexpectedly rich religious cultures at the colonial frontier in Asia and the Americas, although gradually and in persistent tension with the alleged ‘idolatry’ and ‘superstition’ of the non-Christianized cultures, led in the long dureé to the acknowledgement of religions other than Christianity and a new, pluralistic concept of religion (Stroumsa 2010; Masuzawa 2005). 4 Geographically, my study is about Goa. Today one of the federal states of India, from 1510 to 1961, Goa was under Portuguese rule and Catholic hegemony constituting, together with other Portuguese enclaves on India’s Western coast, the longest-held European colony on Indian soil. Marking an important frontline for the combined Portuguese-Catholic expansion into Asia and, for a long time, functioning as the political and religious capitol of the Estado da Índia,3 Goa also became a center for the study of Indian languages and the translation of Christian doctrine and mythology into

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the vernaculars of the potential and actual Indian converts. The initiative for this engagement with Indian languages—and translations towards these languages—came above all from Jesuit missionaries and was part of the doctrinal renewal and reassertion of Catholicism vis-à-vis the Protestant Reformation. Directives for the linguistic and literary activities in the overseas missions came inter alia from the influential Council of Trent (1545–1563). Next to catechisms, liturgical texts, and confession manuals, one genre of early Indian-language translations of Christian topics has gained particular attention today. These are the biblical stories and lives of saints that became known as Christian Purāṇas, a title that highlights not only the translators’ mastery of Konkani and Marathi, the languages spoken at the Western coast of India, and Sanskrit, the classical religious language of Hinduism, but also honors their artful adoption of literary vocabulary and poetic styles derived from the local religious literature of devotional Hinduism or bhakti.4 5 Most highly praised in this regard is the adaptation of the biblical stories into Konkani- Marathi5 by the English Jesuit Thomas Stephens (1549–1619). Stephens’ work is seen today as the initiating model and masterpiece of the Christian Purāṇa literature. It was first printed in Goa in 1616 under the title Discuroso sobre a vinda do salvador ao mundo [Treatise on the coming of the redeemer into the world] 6 em lingoage bramana marastta (sic) [in the Brahmanical Maharashtrian language]. Two other editions followed, in 1649 and 1654. Today the work is popularly known as Kristapurāṇa. 7 It exhibits many similarities with the local devotional Hindu bhakti literature. It is structured in two sections called purāṇas, which relate biblical stories in verse form using the quatrain meter ovī that is characteristic of Maharashtrian bhakti literature. The text includes approximately 4000 stanzas about the Old and 7000 stanzas about the New Testament. Adopting moreover a theological vocabulary that evinces a close affinity with Hindu devotional hymns honoring and worshipping the god Vishnu, Stephens’ work is associated today with that of famous Hindu bhakti poet saints and is believed to have stylistically borrowed above all from the work ofŚrī Sant Ekanātha (1533–1599), a contemporary of Stephens who lived and worked in Maharashtra (Falcao 2003: 12, Van Skyhawk 1999: 366). 6 What buttresses the view that Stephens was consciously adopting forms of Hindu literary style and expression is the fact that his work was part of a larger contemporary Jesuit conversion policy that included a strategy known as accommodatio. This strategy propagated the adoption—in fact, the continuation—of certain local customs and cultural expressions in the religious culture and practices of Christian converts at the colonial frontier. It had a famous advocate and practitioner in the Italian Jesuit Roberto Nobili (1577–1657), who tolerated Brahmanical customs such as the wearing of certain body marks and a tuft of hair on the crown of the head and the continuation of particular food habits such as vegetarianism and caste-related purification rituals among Christian converts in the mission of Madurai in South India (Županov 2001). Accommodatio was also practiced in Goa, where the missionaries adopted Hindu ceremonial styles in the annual local church festivals. Especially notable here are the Catholic ceremonies called Zagor. These continued (and to some extent continue to this day) the all-night Jāgar ceremonies that were performed during the annual Hindu temple festivals and that combine religious worship with ludic entertainment, although with one significant intervention: in the songs and plays presented in the church

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ceremonies, the names, characters, and costumes of Hindu gods are replaced by the names, characters, and costumes of Catholic saints (Henn 2003, 2014). 7 Not all Christian Purāṇa texts produced in early modern Goa, however, reveal the same adaptive attitude towards the religious culture of the Indian gentiles. Another Indian- language Christian text that I will examine in this article is much more intolerant and repudiative with regard to the gentile culture whose literary styles and expressions it copied. This is the Discursos sobre a vida do Apostolo Sam Pedro [Treatises on the life of the Apostle Saint Peter], to which philologists and historians today commonly refer as Peter Purāṇa (Tulpule 1979: 382; Priolkar 1967: 18). This work was composed by the French Jesuit Étienne de la Croix (1579–1643).8 Printed in Latin script in Goa for the first and only time in 1629, in what was also specified as lingoa Bramana Marasta (sic) (de la Croix 1629: title page), the Peter Purāṇa shows notable stylistic commonalities with the Kristapurāṇa. It deals, in good part, with Christian mythology (the life of the Apostle Peter), is structured in three sections called purāṇas, is composed in the poetic meter of the ovī and it amply borrows in its vocabulary and literary style from Hindu sources, especially the local bhakti literature. In fact, Falcao (2003: 13) counts allusions to as many as twenty-six Hindu sources in the Peter Purāṇa. In one significant point, however, de la Croix’ Peter Purāṇa deviates from Stephens’ Kristapurāṇa: it not only deals with Christian mythology, but also extensively engages in what it calls ‘the refutation of the false gods’ of the Indian gentiles. In other words, the French Jesuit takes great effort and space to systematically name, list and describe all the gods, saintly persons, and tutelary beings known to him that are worshipped by the gentiles in the Konkan area, addressing thus what—in lieu of the word religion—he calls Concanneponni or ‘Konkanness’ (de la Croix I.202.9). De la Croix contests and refutes the idea that the gentile deities have any divine nature or sacred value; for him, divinity and Truth are exclusively reserved for the Christian God. 8 The oddity of a text which thus rejects, in the Hindu context, the theological meaning and appreciation of precisely those Konkani-Marathi terms and expressions that it adopts in order to express the theological truth claim of the Christian god and doctrine in an Indian language is aggravated by other adverse circumstances. The brief but prolific period between the mid-sixteenth and mid-seventeenth centuries during which Catholic missionaries engaged with Indian philology, producing numerous Indian- language vocabularies and grammars and composing the Christian purāṇa literature, it turns out, was also the period in which the Portuguese-Catholic regime in Goa and other Portuguese-controlled areas in India9 launched a ruthless campaign of destruction and oppression against Hindu culture. It was not only that this campaign destroyed with determined iconoclastic violence all Hindu temples, and images throughout Goa and systematically replaced the Hindu monuments with Christian churches, chapels and crosses (Henn 2014). Archaeological findings indicate that some of Goa’s oldest churches were also at least partly built from the very rubble of the destroyed temples that they replaced (Mitterwallner 1983; Doshi & Shirodkar 1983). In addition, the campaign banned and persecuted under severe punishment the public performance of all Hindu ceremonies, including marriage rites and the of the dead. Moreover, Goan historians and literary scholars cite historical sources demonstrating that the missionaries even targeted and destroyed precisely those Hindu books and manuscripts that they themselves used, as sources of learning and

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stylistic templates, as they produced the Christian purāṇa literature (Da Cunha Rivara 1858: 14; Priolkar 1967: 76; Patil 1999). 9 Against this background, a second set of problems that I want to address in this article turns around questions regarding the coexistence and contiguity of translation and violence, hermeneutics and destruction. Was there a connection between these seemingly contradictory positions? Or were the translations, as the modern division of secular and religious domains implies, merely profane activities that had no intrinsic connection with the religious zealotry in the midst of which they were produced? What does the coexistence of translation and violence imply for the theoretical qualification of translation, and what does it mean for the contemporary concept of religion and the gradually emerging recognition that, next to Christianity, there exist other religions? In pursuing these questions, I will focus primarily on the ways Thomas Stephens and Étienne de la Croix translated and positioned vis-à-vis each other the names and designations of God, gods, and saintly and demonic beings from the two worlds of the Indian gentilismo or Concanneponni and Christian doctrine. Technically, I will rely in my analysis of the Kristapurāṇa on its modern reproduction by Saldanha (1907) and secondary literature by Nelson Falcao (2003), Hugh Van Skyhawk (1999), and Pär Eliasson (2015),10 and for the Peter Purāṇa on a reading of the original text by de la Croix (1629) supported by its fragmentary translation into Portuguese by Da Cunha Rivara (1865). Names Translated—Names Negated 10 Of all the works written in the Christian Purāṇa style, modern scholars without exception agree that Stephens’ Kristapurāṇa shows the greatest literary skill and poetic art. It summarizes in two purāṇas the story related in the Bible. The first or Pailo Purana (sic) recounts all the major events described in the Old Testament: the creation of the world, the nature of the angels and the fall of Lucifer, the creation of Adam and Eve, their original sin and banishment from paradise, the unfaithful life of people and the great flood, the preservation of Noah, and the call of Abraham. The second or Dusoro Purana (sic) tells the stories and introduces the characters of the New Testament: the birth of Christ the Redeemer; his mother, Mary; John the Baptist; the life and teaching of Christ; his passion, death, , and ascension to heaven.

11 In presenting the Christian epic, Stephens is noted for creating numerous ‘Hindu names’ in Konkani-Marathi or Sanskrit in order to designate and circumscribe the Christian God and Trinity, Devabāpa (God the Father), Devasutā (God the Son), and İsphari Saṅtā (the Holy Spirit), as well as Jesus Christ and Holy Mary (Falcao 2003: 41, see also Van Skyhawk 1999: 369). With regard to the biblical story, Stephens thus tells how Devabāpa (God the Father), Vaikunṭharāyā (Lord of Heaven), Parameśvara (Supreme God), and Sarvācyā Racanārā (Maker of All) sends Devasutā (God’s son), Jeju Kristarāja (Jesus the King), also addressed by the titles of Viśvatāraku (Savior of the World), Jñānadipu Paripurṇā (Lamp of Perfect Knowledge), and Dharmaiticā Denakarū (Sun of Righteousness) to earth in order to defeat Mārūvā (Satan), Devācara (the evil ghost), and Ajāgara (the serpent) and to overwhelm papa (sin), cut off dośa banda (the bonds of guilt), and eradicate avidyā (ignorance), thereby bringing dipti (light), jñāna (knowledge), and muktī (liberation) to the people of the world and reconciling svarga and saṃsāra (heaven and earth; Falcao 2003: 25–34). 12 In a similarly creative and poetic way, Stephens is noted for telling the story of Mary, for whose honorific description and devotional praise he used more than eighty

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different names and titles, such as Bhāgyevanta Mari (the Blessed Mary), Devamātā (Mother of God), Vaikuṇṭhapatice Māte Aṅkuvāri (Virgin Mother of the Lord of Heaven), Pavitra Mātā (Holy Mother), Sadevi Aṅkuvāri (Blessed Virgin), Devadutāṇci Rānī (Queen of the Angels), Sadaivi Bhāgeveti Striyāmaji (Most Blessed among Women), Svargīci Rāṇī (Queen of Heaven), and Kṛpe Karūṇeci (Fountain of Grace and Compassion) glorifying her to be caṇdrabiṃba sundari (beautiful as the moon) and surya nirmaḷa (spotless as the sun) (Falcao 2003: 33–37). It is, among other things, for these skillful and poetic renderings of the name and designation of the Christian holy persons, Jesus Christ and the Holy Mary, in Konkani-Marathi-Sanskrit that Stephens is praised today as ‘building bridges between Christian and Hindu worlds’ (Falcao 2003: 170) and ‘put[ing] Hindu patterns of thought in the service of Christianity’ (Van Skyhawk 1999: 365). 13 A critical objection comes from the young Swedish scholar Eliasson (2015), who warns that Stephens’ Konkani-Marathi for the Christian God may not have been as uncritically adaptive vis-à-vis the local culture as it is commonly assumed. While Stephens, obviously, used many expressions for the divine from the Vaishnavite tradition when translating the designation of the Christian God, Eliasson points out that he never used or even mentioned the name of Vishnu himself. That this notable fact has not been noticed before is arguably due to a modern understanding of translation that makes a distinction between designation and name to the effect that designations can be translated, but names, for their idiosyncratic nature, cannot. A historical comparison, however, suggests that this is a modern assumption, which cannot be found everywhere in ancient contexts. Hence, Assmann presents evidence that in the Greco-Egyptian-Mesopotamian world it was common that Utu, the name of the Sumerian Sun God, was considered a translation or rendering of Shamas in Akkadian and Shimgi in the Hurritic language, and even had the feminine equivalents Aia in Sumerian and Ejan in Hurritic. 11 Obviously, no such equivalences were used or even thinkable in early-modern Hindu-Catholic contexts. To be sure, also in the ancient Mesopotamian context, not every name of god was considered translatable; this, however, Assmann underlines, was for ‘theological,’ not technical, reasons (Assmann 2008: 140, emphasis in the original). In other words, I think that the avoidance of the name and designation of Vishnu in the Kristapurāṇa was also based on theological and not technical reasons, and that Eliasson is right when he argues that, ‘by giving the God of the Christian religion attributes like ‘King of Vaikuṁṭha’ [...] but not calling him by the proper name of Viṣṇu, [Stephens] implicitly says that it is God (the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob) who is King of Vaikuṁṭha,’ and not Viṣṇu’ (Eliasson 2015: 8). 14 Notably, Falcao himself mentions another, obviously conscious omission of an Indian term in Stephens’ Kristapurāṇa. While commonly using terms like purāṇa, smṛiti, or śāstra, all of which are designations for genres of religious scripture in the Hindu tradition, the English Jesuit, conspicuously, never uses the term śruti to designate any of the Christian textual corpora (Falcao 2003: 72), although this term represents textual traditions that enjoy the highest theological appreciation and authority in Hindu understanding. More precisely, śruti translates as ‘heard’ and specifies among other things the oldest Hindu textual corpora of the Vedas, indicating that these were directly revealed from divine origins to human sages and thus in contrast with other textual corpora qualified as smriti, that is, ‘remembered,’ or purāṇa, that is, ‘ancient,’ which are considered to be only of human origin. Arguably, the issue reveals a peculiar concern of the Christian author with regard to Indian-language terms or texts, which

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do not just symbolically represent what they are dealing with but mark an intrinsic connection with their content, the divine, by evoking what in theological terms is called the praesentia, that is, ritual presence of the divine, and establishing what semiotic theory calls an indexical relationship or physical affinity with it. 15 When comparing then Stephens’s Kristapurāṇa with de la Croix’ Peter Purāṇa, both correspondences and deviations become visible. The Peter Purāṇa reproduces all major stylistic characteristics of the Kristapurāṇa: it is subdivided into three purāṇas, deals with a Christian topic, and extensively copies the poetic and literary style of the Maharashtrian Hindu bhakti tradition. The first purāṇa narrates the story of St. Peter: how he walks among the disciples of Christ; how he attends the last supper; how, after Jesus’ capture, he denies out of fear his companionship with him; how he nevertheless is selected to disseminate Christian Law among the Jews. Obviously, the extended narration of Peter’s missionary travels and travails among the Jews, also called the ‘Gentiles of the Orient,’ presented in this first part was meant to stand as a kind of allegory of the challenges and tasks faced by the early modern missionary in the land of the Indian gentiles. 16 The title of the second purāṇa then reveals the actual goal of the work, saying: ‘Here is dealt with the refutation of the worship of the false gods of the Konkanis’ (de la Croix 1629: I.76). This is followed by the presentation of different classes of cuddham devan, ‘false gods,’ beginning appropriately, although ironically, with the qhonddono or ‘refutation’ of Gonesso or Ganesh, the god that Hindus invariably venerate as the overcomer of obstacles at the beginning of any significant action (de la Croix 1629: I. 102). The first book of the first purāṇa is then dedicated to the refutations of the worship of ‘men, plants and snakes.’ Nagues, the god Nageshi, whom Goan Hindus identify inter alia as a snake god, is listed (de la Croix 1629: I.106.), as well as Tulossi, the goddess Tulsi, who is embodied in the sacred Tulasi plant (de la Croix 1629: I.118.12), and Vottam pimpollansso, that is, the sacred peepal tree (ficus religiosa) (de la Croix 1629: I.136). Variously mentioned and condemned is the ‘worship of the cow,’ as well as the fact that the gentiles refuse to eat beef. Finally, the condemnation of the worship of Santeri Devo, that is, the goddess Sateri, demonstrates an awareness of the significance that this ancient goddess has in Goa and the Konkan, since the text dedicates two entire sections to her in which it is elaborated that she has no divinity but only cuddheponno, ‘falsehood,’ which is why her worship is of no avail (de la Croix 1629: I.123, 129). 17 The second book of the second purāṇa is dedicated to the refutation of purosso, that is, ‘ancestors’; addisto, another type of deified human; and Soitana, that is, Satan or the devil (de la Croix 1629: I.153, 156). Here, the individual verses condemn the worship of people who died from , and warn that the devil may disguise himself as ancestor and, with the help of his bhatta (that is, priests) may offer prassada (that is, oracles and other deceptive advice) to people (de la Croix 1629: I.175). The third book of the second purāṇa, finally, deals with the refutation of the worship of Betalle, that is, the ancient Konkan god Vetaḷ, who is classified as bhūta, a well-known Sanskrit designation for ghosts. Obviously aware of the fact that Goan Hindus often venerate both Vetaḷ and certain bhūtas as rakhne, that is, tutelary beings, the book explicitly notes that none of these little gods can be seen as Deva maintra, ‘helpers of God,’ or as raqhannai, ‘guardians’ of villages and fields, but all are just forms of Saitana, the devil (de la Croix 1629: I.208, 211). Instead, it is emphasized that only bhoduve, ‘angels,’ can be seen as ‘servants of God’ and only the ‘prayers of the apostles,’ ‘relics [of saints],’ and ‘the sign

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of the cross’ can prevent misfortune and protect people against the devil (de la Croix 1629: I.232, 236). 18 The refutation of ‘false gods’ continues in the fourth book of the second purāṇa, addressing the proverbial 33 million gods of Hindu India, who are simply presented as tetissa cottiche cuddheponno, that is, ‘33 million [forms of] falseness’ (de la Croix 1629: I. 279, 295). Finally, the fifth book vilifies the three supreme gods Brahma, Vistnum and Mahessu, Brahma, Vishnu and Mahadev (de la Croix 1629: I.1). All these divine beings, which are said to be mentioned in the gentivo gronthi, the scriptures of the gentiles, especially the Vedo and Puranna, are variously highlighted as being neither gods nor representations of the origin of the universe, but weak, ignorant, and unable to offer any salvation. In their stead, the third and final purāṇa is all set to assert and elaborate that only Poromesvoro, the ‘Supreme [Christian] God,’ is true, unique, powerful, and without beginning or end (de la Croix 1629: II.1f, see also Ao Leitor [Introduction] 92f). Translation—Pluralism—Modernity 19 When addressing then the question whether the early modern Christian Purāṇa literature facilitated the recognition of the Indian gentilismo or Concanneponni as a religion and thus marked the beginning of the recognition of religious pluralism around the globe, an intriguingly polarized image comes to the fore. On the one hand, there can be no doubt that Thomas Stephens was an innovative spirit who revolutionized the communication and understanding between the religious cultures of Christians and Indian gentiles. On the other hand, it is obvious that Étienne de la Croix had a very different impact in this respect. That the Catholic clergy at the time were divided over this question is further illustrated by the fact that the innovative Jesuit strategy of accommodatio, that is, leniency with regard to the continuation of certain local practices among Christian converts in India, led to a major theological dispute. After initially finding the approval of the Roman Curia, the notorious Malabar Rites, as the Jesuit experiments came to be called, met with persistent and vociferous clerical protest during the seventeenth century, and eventually, towards the end of the century, were banned as illegitimate practices facilitating idolatry and superstition (Županov 2001). In the same way, the production and even reading of Christian Purāṇa literature was banned, and, in 1684, the Portuguese viceroy ordered that henceforth all liturgical texts and official church communications in India had to be either in Portuguese or in Latin (Da Cunha Rivara 1858: 35; Priolkar 1967: 64).

20 What complicates the question at stake is the fact that modern scholarship tends to obscure the role of the iconoclastic violence in the context and production of the Christian Purāṇa translations. Most outspoken is Joseph Saldanha, the compiler and editor of the Kristapurāṇa in 1907. He shows that Thomas Stephens, while being the rector of the Jesuit College in Goa, had to deal with numerous violent incidents. Saldanha publishes a letter that Stephens wrote to his brother, in which he describes a gruesome event that happened 1583 in the village Cuncolim in the province of Salcete, a province that Stephens was overseeing. The letter tells of the destruction and desecration of the local Hindu temple by Portuguese soldiers as well as the subsequent assault upon and killing of five Catholic missionaries by the villagers. Stephens describes the event in some detail, mentioning both the demolishing of the temple and the ‘[slaying of] a cow upon the altar of the idol so as to clear the place of the superstitious people,’ as well as the horrible things that the ‘infidels’ did to the missionaries, including plucking out eyes, cutting off heads, and ‘other acts of atrocity

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which I am loath to recount’ (Stephens 1907: XXXI). Saldanha even quotes Da Cunha Rivara’s claim that the Portuguese soldiers ‘in the first excitement of the conquest’ are said ‘to have had all books written in the vernacular language burnt as convicted or suspected of containing the precepts and doctrine of idolatry’ (Stephens 1907: XL). Nowhere, though, would he consider that there could have been a connection between the translation of Christian doctrine and the destruction of Indian material culture and literature. A similar position is taken by Hugh Van Skyhawk. He also mentions extensively the ‘oppression and atrocities’ to which the Portuguese- Catholic regime had subjugated the Goan population at the time of Thomas Stephens, yet, not only does Van Skyhawk completely detach the production of the Kristapurāṇa from this violent environment, but he even insinuates that Stephens’ hermeneutical approach marked a distinct renunciation of the violent encounter (Van Skyhawk 1999: 364, passim). Nelson Falcao (2003), who has published the most comprehensive modern analysis of Stephens’ Kristapurāṇa, celebrating it as an early form of ‘inculturation,’ 12does not mention the iconoclastic concomitances of its early modern production at all.13 21 To be sure, the problem is primarily not whether Thomas Stephens can be considered a harbinger of modernity, who was more advanced than Étienne de la Croix. At least, one cannot base such a comparison on the technical and hermeneutical skills involved in the translations, since de la Croix presents, if not the same high quality as Stephens, certainly a translation that marks a remarkable modern innovation for its time. In other words, to say that Stephens was more sympathetic towards the religious culture of the Indian gentiles may identify him as a good man; it does not, however, help us to clarify the question whether or to what extent the novel technique of translating across the sacred scriptures of diverse religions helped to facilitate religious pluralism. Nor is the main question whether one can find an argument justifying the fact that an intense linguistic or philological engagement with a certain culture can, despite all hermeneutical dialogue, go together with an impulse to dominate or even destroy the culture. Such impulses have been amply evidenced and described, referring above all to the theological goal of conversion, that is, the eradication of so-called , or the political goal of conquest and domination, for both of which linguistic knowledge and skill in translation have been shown to be important strategies (Robinson 1993). 22 What is at stake is the question of how modern scholarship conceptualizes the operations of translation in the context of the early modern Hindu-Catholic encounter and how this conceptualization is positioned with regard to the question of how translation is related to iconoclastic violence on the one hand and the emergence of religious pluralism on the other hand. The significance of this question, I should add, lies in the fact that any uncritical appraisal of the early modern translation of Christian topics into Indian languages runs the risk of mystifying not only translation but also the idea of modernity itself. Obviously, the scholars who deal with Stephens’ Kristapurāṇa take translation to be a transaction that facilitates communication between two different languages. Technically, the most important part of this operation is the functionality of a third or mediating ground, also called tertium comparationis that is conceptualized as intelligibility. This means that a word can be translated from one language to another by virtue of the fact that, arguably, its meaning exists in the lexical and semantic field of both languages. Hence, Konkani baiḷ

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translates into English woman because both languages have distinct expressions for the common and, in fact, universal notion of female human. 23 Another essential qualification inherent in this modern conceptualization of translation is revealed by semiotic theory. Translation, it is shown, treats linguistic expressions as symbols. This implies that the sign and the signified are taken to relate to each other by way of an arbitrary cultural code such as language. This symbolic nature of signification excludes or, at least, minimizes the relationship between the symbol and the signified being based on an intrinsic or substantial connection. In other words, the symbol is said not to rely on any specific cultural embodiment and to thus be different from the type of sign that semiotic theory classifies as an icon and that relates to the signified by way of distinct cultural reifications of similarity or similitude. In the same way, the symbol is taken to differ from the type of sign classified as an index that is connected with the signified by way of the assumption of specific physical contiguities or affinities.14 In fact, following semiotic theory, it is precisely the metaphorical aloofness of the relationship between the symbol and the signified that enables its meaning to break free from any particular cultural embodiment of similarity, contiguity, or affinity and allows it to find expression—that is, translation— in many languages. 24 The process of translation becomes more complex, though, when its operations are examined in the domain of religion and conditioned by the specific historical context of early-modern Goa. Here, the translation of the Konkani dev (or any other vernacular expression for divine being, for that matter) into the English god, arguably does more than just mediating a common lexical concept for divine being. Rather, the assumption that the name and word of god can be translated into different languages carries with it the assumption that there is more than one religion, and hence acknowledges a pluralistic and relativistic concept of religion. More precisely, I argue that the scholars praising Stephens’ Kristapurāṇa as a remarkable piece of modern translation implicitly take for granted that the producers of the Christian Purāṇa literature operated under the modern philosophical presupposition that Religion marks an anthropological universal, whose cultural diversification into many religions can be mediated by the same principle that mediates between different linguistic expressions in translation. 25 The crucial nature of this modern assumption can hardly be exaggerated in the historical contexts of the Catholic-Protestant division in Europe and the Christian encounter with the religious cultures of Asia and America in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In particular, the revival and intensification of the theological debate about so-called idolatry initiated a global attack against the use of religious images (Bernand & Gruzinski 1988, Henn 2014) that also challenged and complicated the idea that the Christian Truth can be translated or Christian prayer formulated in ‘pagan languages’ (Keane 2007). To be sure, both the repudiation of religious images and the questioning of the translatability of religious language existed long before and were based on a multitude of theological, moral, and aesthetic arguments. The point to be highlighted is therefore that, in the transition from the pre-modern to the modern period, the problem with images and translation acquired an entirely new and global dimension, which Webb Keane (2007: 59) calls a shift in ‘semiotic ideology’ and which Michel Foucault elaborates in his Les Mots et Les Choses (1973). This shift involved nothing less than a fundamental upheaval of the ways in which the ‘Truth,’ or knowledge for that matter, can be accessed and communicated. Moreover, it is

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questioned today whether the modern paradigm that correlates the philosophically argued singular of Religion with the ethnographically experienced plural of religions indeed had the liberalizing and relativizing effect that is ascribed to it (Stroumsa 2010), or whether it rather obscures a hidden Judeo-Christian notion of transcendence or even monotheism (Bell 2003, De Vries 2008, Masuzawa 2005, Henn 2014). It is against this background that one must problematize the assumption that translation and signification mark neutral and universal operations that can be detached from the historical contexts and cultural conditions of their production or practice. Burghart’s analysis (1989) of the ability to render different religious traditions translatable in the Hindu context by reference to the notion of an unqualifiable and, therefore, all- embracing and potentially polytheistic nature of the divine marks a notable example of a mode of translation that operates on a paradigm that differs from the concept of semantic intelligibility. Revealing the deictic nature of the notion of God used by the Nuer in Sudan, Michael Lambek provides another interesting example (Lambek 2008). Similarly, I argue that the early modern missionary translations in Goa did not treat their subjects, the name of god and the various notions of divine agency, simply and exclusively by reference to semantic intelligibility or arbitrary symbols, but rather saw them invested with semiotic power and theological efficacy, the mediation and control of which required more than just semantic operations. 26 In order to substantiate this argument, I would like to return once again to de la Croix’ Peter Purāṇa. Arguably, the most striking feature of this text is how conceptually similar and theoretically inherent to the Christian Self is the gentile Other that the text constructs and presents. Nothing of the Concanneponni, it seems, is really different or altogether new to the Christian author; all is just in reverse order, like the Devil and the false gods that hold the place of the True God, or has its opposite equivalents, like the gentile scriptures of the Vedas, purāṇas and śāstras that occupy the site of the Christian Law. In the same way, Vetaḷ, the bhūtas and demons are said to just deceptively pretend to do what their Christian equivalents, the angels, apostles and other servants of god do in fact, and the many useless and powerless practices and objects of the gentiles are said to prevent them from recognizing the power that emanates from Christian practices and objects such as the prayers of the apostles, the relics of the saints, and the sign of the cross. 27 Intriguingly, the Concanneponni and the Christian doctrine, although positioned as opposites and adversaries, are thus not presented as radically different and separate. Unlike later periods of Orientalism, the colonial subject is not portrayed as the polarized and distanced Other, but rather appears as a distorted or decayed form of the Self. Most revealing here is a passage in the Peter Purāṇa in which the relationship between Concanneponni and Christian doctrine is expressed allegorically by saying: ‘when gold is mixed with an alloy [of inferior material], the venerable name of the gold is also claimed by the alloy.’ Obviously associating gold with the God of the Christian tradition and equating the alloy with the demonic forces of the Concanneponni, the text goes on to say that, therefore, only ‘the force of fire that separates the gold from the alloy’ is able to rescue the ‘light’ of the Christian truth from the ‘darkness’ of the Concanneponni (de la Croix 1629: I.202.11f). 28 In sum, what the passage reveals is that translation in the Peter Purāṇa operates on the assumption of a distinct affinity between Concanneponni and Christian doctrine, implying that ‘Christian Truth’ is pervasive, that is, known and present throughout

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time and space, except for those areas where it is misconceived, corrupted and obscured by the ignorance of the cega gentilidade ‘blind gentilehood’ (de la Croix 1629: I, Ao Leitor [Introduction] 92) and the deceptive fabrications of the Devil. 15 Therefore, it does not stretch interpretation too much to argue that the reference that the allegory of ‘the gold and the alloy’ makes to the ‘force of fire’—as rectifying the allegedly deceptive use of the true name of the Christian God and restoring the corrupted and obscured Truth of Christian doctrine in the pagan world—reveals that the contemporaneity of the production of the Christian Purāṇa literature and the destruction of the material culture and literature of Indian gentiles was by no means a coincidence. Rather, we recognize that Christian Purāṇa literature was consciously and strategically meant to replace Hindu bhakti literature, just as Catholic churches and chapels replaced Hindu temples and shrines. Conclusion 29 By way of conclusion it is to be acknowledged that the early modern missionary translations of Christian mythology and doctrine into Indian languages and the rendering of designations and honorific titles for the Christian God, Jesus Christ, and the Holy Mary into designations adopted and borrowed from the theological and devotional repertoire of Hindu literature initiated innovative methods and perspectives in the communication and understanding between the religious cultures of the Indian gentiles and the European Christians. At the same time, however, the materials from Goa reveal that the translatability of the name of the Christian God still had clear theological limitations at the turn of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. These limitations were due not only to the denial of the divine status and nature of the gods of the Indian gentiles, but also to the fact that Christian authors were far from recognizing that the so-called gentilismo or Concanneponni constituted a religion and thus evidenced the existence of religious pluralism around the world. Instead, this study has shown that the early modern production of Indian-language Christian texts in greater Goa was an intrinsic part of a strategic campaign of destruction, oppression, and replacement directed against Indian and Hindu culture and literature.

30 The critical finding of the study is that relevant modern scholarship tends to obscure this connection between the literary activities of the missionaries and iconoclastic destruction, thereby revealing a problematic perspective on the concepts of translation and religious pluralism. The failure to recognize the connection between translation and violence, hermeneutics and destruction, it becomes clear, is not based on historical ignorance or factual denial, but on epistemic assumptions. Even where the contiguity of translation and violence is seen and recognized, it is denied that there exists any relevant connection between the two. The reasoning for this lies in the implicit assumption that translation operates on a neutral ground of intelligibility that not only is detached from any concrete and embodied expressivity of the cultures that it mediates, but also has no relevant connection with the contingencies that determine its political rationale and historical production. Obviously suppressed is the anthropological insight into the historically changing and culturally diverse significance that words and other forms of spoken or written expression and communication, including translation itself, have beyond and apart from their lexical meaning and semantic intelligibility (Burghart 1989, Rafael 1983, Keane 2004, 2007). Arguably, this mystification of the historical condition and cultural embodiment of language and translation extends to the mystification of the modern emergence of

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religious pluralism itself. The argued natural affinity of translation and pluralism, we have seen, tends to obscure the theological denial, iconoclastic destruction, and semiotic misrepresentation that the translation of the name of the Christian God has brought to many languages and religions of the world.

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NOTES

1. I would like to thank Ines Županov for her valuable comments on an earlier version of this article; I thank Anne Feldhaus for discussing this latest version with me and helping me refine the English. 2. Interestingly, the climax of the iconoclastic destruction that was triggered by the revival of this theological controversy over religious images happened in three parts of the world in the same period, between 1540 and 1560, targeting Catholic images in Central Europe (Eire 1986), Hindu images in Western India (Henn 2014), and Nahua or Aztec images in Mexico (Bernand & Gruzinski 1988). This shows that the early modern revival of the theological antagonism toward images gained a truly global dimension in the mid-sixteenth century. 3. The political framework of the combined Portuguese-Catholic regime that constituted the Estado da Índia, the Portuguese empire in Asia, was the padroado, that is, political patronage and supervision of all overseas missionary activities by the Portuguese Crown. 4. Literally translated as ‘participation,’ bhakti characterizes a form of piety that favors an intimate relationship with a personalized god and, to some extent, constitutes a demotic counter-current to certain aspects of Brahmanical theology and temple religiosity. In the field of literature, bhakti religiosity helped to boost regional languages against the claimed exclusivity of Sanskrit in religious writings, stimulating the production of a rich body of devotional literature in the various regional vernaculars. In Maharashtra, bhakti literature has especially deep historical roots, going back to famous poet-saints such as Jñāneśvara (c. 1275–96), and experienced a second heyday at the time and in the work of Ekanāth (1533–1599). 5. The question whether the language of the Kristapurāṇa, which the Imprimatur of 1616 describes as bramana marrasta (sic) (Stephens 1907: LXXXVII), is to be classified as ‘Old Marathi’ (Skyhawk 1999: 363) or a ‘Konkan form of Marathi’ or ‘downright Konkani’ (Stephens 1907: LXVII, LXVI), has long been a matter of dispute among scholars and activists involved in Konkan language politics. Most scholars today seem to concur with Saldanha’s position that, given the language dynamics in the early-modern Konkan region, the question cannot be clearly decided and that the Kristapurāṇa was obviously intelligible both to people who then lived in areas which are today Konkani-speaking and to people in areas which are today Marathi-speaking. I have therefore decided to call the language of the historical Kristapurāṇa Konkani-Marathi. 6. Unfortunately, no original or early copy of this text is extant today. Instead, Stephens’ Kristapurāṇa exists in two printed reproductions. One of them, in Devānāgari script, is based on a handwritten manuscript found in 1925 in the Marsden Collection of the School of Oriental Studies archives in London. It is not known who made this reproduction or when and where it was made. Schurhammer speculates that it may have originated in the eighteenth century (Falcao 2003: 42). Another reproduction, in Latin script, was compiled and edited by Joseph L. Saldanha in 1907 in Mangalore from numerous handwritten manuscripts that were and possibly still are in liturgical use among the Goan diaspora population in South Kanara. Comparing the two reproductions, Falcao notes that the Marsden manuscript uses ‘terms and concepts that are more Sanskritized and Indianized’ (Falcao 2003: 23). In 1956 and 1996, modern editions in Devānāgari appeared in Pune and Mumbai, respectively. 7. It is not entirely clear whether, and if so when, Kristapurāṇa became the title of one of the historical editions. The imprimaturs or licenses for printing the first edition, issued in 1614/1615, mention only the Portuguese title of the Discursos. In some of the licenses for the second edition, issued in 1646/1647/1649, the title of the work reads rather as descriptive or abbreviated such as:

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este livro da Purana or Purana do Padre Thomaz Estevão [this book of Purāṇa; Purāṇa by Father Thomas Stephens]. In the licenses for the third edition, issued in 1653/1654, the title is then given as Puranna da vinda e vida do Christo [Purāṇa of the coming and life of Christ] (Stephens 1907: LXXXVII–LXXXIX). Falcao cites the title of the Marsden edition in London as ‘The Christian Purāṇa’ (Falcao 2003: 213). It may be that the title Kristapurāṇa first appears in one of the modern reproductions. 8. It is preserved today in two microfilm series (198 and 199) in the Biblioteca Nacional de Portugal in Lisbon. A substantial fragment of de la Croix’ Peter Purāṇa was found by the Goan historian Da Cunha Rivara in the Biblioteca Publica de Nova Goa (Panjim) in the mid-nineteenth century. Using a slightly modernized transliteration, Da Cunha Rivara reproduced and printed this fragment and translated it into Portuguese in his Ensaio Histórico da Língua Concani (1858: 131ff). 9. The Portuguese-controlled regions of Baçaim, Bombay, Damão and Chaul in today’s Maharashtra and Gujarat and the region of Mylapur in Tamil Nadu were also affected by the violence. Arguably, the South of India, in particular Tamilnadu (except the Mylapur region) and Kerala, where the Jesuits were also active, was spared from major iconoclastic violence, because the Portuguese-Catholic regime had no major military presence there. 10. Ananya Chakravarti’s forthcoming article on the Kristapurāṇa in History of Religions was not yet accessible to me at the time this went to press. 11. Obviously, many more examples of the translatability of names can be found. A particularly appropriate example might be the first name of the author of the Peter Purāṇa, which in its original French version is Étienne and on the title page of the Peter Purāṇa appears in its Portuguese rendering [E]steuaõ (de la Croix 1629, title page). 12. ‘Inculturation’ is the term used by the Roman Catholic Church referring to the adaptation of local cultural customs, e.g. the veneration of ancestors in China, in the teachings and practices of local churches. 13. Ângela Barreto Xavier and Ines Županov mention the violence only in passing in their chapter on Portuguese Linguistic Empire: Translation and Conversion (2015). This may have to do with the fact that they focus primarily on South India and other places where the Portuguese-Catholic regime could not engage in iconoclastic violence because it had a much weaker military presence than in Goa and on the western coast. Subrahmanyam (2001) demonstrates, for instance, that the famous Tirumale-Tirupati temple complex in Andhra Pradesh was targeted for destruction by the Portuguese; however, the plan was not executed because of the military superiority of the Hindu kingdom, Vijayanagara, that was ruling in the region. 14. The conceptualization of this tri-partite division of semiotic signs goes back to the work of Charles Sanders Peirce. Its general meaning for the study of culture is elaborated in language philosophy (Jakobson 1965); its relevance for the study of the history and anthropology of religion has been discussed by Webb Keane (2004, 2007). 15. To elaborate on the full dimension and significance this paradigm of similarity had in the early-modern Portuguese-Indian encounter would exceed the space of this article. As I show in more detail elsewhere (Henn 2014), the pervasive ‘search for the similar’—as Michael Pearson cogently called the phenomenon (1987: 116; 2005)—manifested itself in Portuguese chronicles and missionary corpora in numerous and long-lasting speculations about hidden theological commonalities, linguistic similarities, and genealogical relationships between Indian gentiles and European Christians. Its most curious instance might have been Vasco Da Gama’s error after his celebrated landfall in Malabar (Kerala) in 1498. Following old legends about ‘Lost Christians’ in the vast eastern lands of the ‘Indies,’ he persistently mistook the Hindus he met for Christians and made his crew pray in front of an image of a Hindu goddess which he claimed represented the Catholic Holy Mary. More than just a temporary gaffe or hermeneutical illusion, I argue, Vasco Da Gama’s error emerged from complex theological and epistemological preconceptions

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that, for a very long time, resisted the recognition that there exist other religions besides Christianity. A most common factor in these preconceptions was no one less than the ‘Devil’, who was despised in contemporary sources for ‘manag[ing] to ape the true God everywhere in blind paganism, simulating the mysteries of the Faith, so that, even when the truth is later proclaimed, men cannot distinguish it from the falsehoods in which they were brought up, for when one is shortsighted and things present some similarity, one thing is easily mistaken for another’ (Godinho 1990: 42).

ABSTRACTS

In the 16th and 17 th centuries, Jesuit missionaries began to translate Christian doctrine and mythology into Indian languages. Most critical became the question how the very name(s) of God and gods can be translated. Artfully composed texts known as Christian Purāṇas borrowed from the religious terminology and literary styles of Indian devotional literature and are praised today for mediating between the cultures of Christians and Hindus (the latter called ‘gentiles’ in the contemporary sources). At the same time, the Portuguese-Catholic regime in India launched a ruthless iconoclastic campaign against the culture of the Indian gentiles, destroying their temples and images and denigrating their allegedly ‘false gods.’ Against this background, the article addresses the questions of what the relation was between translation and violence; how hermeneutics and destruction coexisted; and how the idea that the translations facilitated the modern emergence of religious pluralism is to be qualified.

INDEX

Keywords: translation, early modernity, Hinduism, Christianity, Jesuits, accommodatio, iconoclasm, semiotics, pluralism

AUTHOR

ALEXANDER HENN

Associate Professor, Department of Religious Studies, University of Arizona

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On the Im/Propriety of Brand Names

William Mazzarella

AUTHOR'S NOTE

Deep thanks to Veena Das and Jacob Copeman for inviting me to participate in the panel that led to this collection. Their consideration, forbearance, and wonderful commentaries allowed me to skate onto thin ice with some self-consciousness but with little embarrassment. Three anonymous reviewers for SAMAJ helpfully and tolerantly put things in perspective. Special gratitude is due to Costas Nakassis, whose engagement with a rather eccentric draft version of the paper was both generous and challenging in the most exemplary way.

Proprius

1 What kind of name is a brand name? A proper name, evidently, but of a curious kind. A brand name, like other proper names, must refer only to itself. At the same time, it has to be capacious enough to encompass within itself a sometimes-bewildering range of product extensions, both in the present and in the future. How should we understand the way in which a brand name grounds this play of identity and difference, of coherence and incoherence, of past, present, and future? Is there something about proper names as such that allows this to happen? Conversely, is there something about brand names that prompts us to rethink what we think we know about proper names?

2 The Norwegian writer Karl-Ove Knausgård (2013) observes that a proper name is the one thing in fiction that resists being fictionalized. And of course this is also true of that particular kind of fiction that we call ethnography. When I turned my PhD thesis into the book that was published as Shoveling Smoke (2003), my decision to anonymize the names of the brands in the section based on my fieldwork in a Mumbai advertising agency meant that I was unable to include some of the material that I want to discuss in

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this essay, since this little bit of material was all about the names. Now that fifteen years or so have passed since I wrote that book, I feel that I can speak those names more freely. People have moved on, brand names have changed. The world that was tied to and animated by those names has dissolved. But of course it is still a judgment call.1 3 Names contain and organize, as it were, the life of their times. We cannot, in the last instance, exert full control over the resonances and potentialities of any name, including our own. And yet consumer capitalism as we know it today could not exist were it not that we are legally permitted to own and sell brand names, as well as their associated graphic properties. If brand names are proper names, then their proprius is double, referring at once to a property of mine (a distinctive characteristic) and my property (legal ownership). Many would argue that there is something inherently suspect about corporate claims to exert sovereign control over brand names, given that brands only have value insofar as we invest our collective imaginative labour and our responsiveness, our mimetic addressability, in them. What kind of ‘primitive accumulation’ is branding? By what right and by what means can a corporation so to speak enclose a piece of the collective mimetic archive (Mazzarella forthcoming) under its name? As Rosemary Coombe writes, trademarks and brand names attempt to channel ‘the cultural energy of mimesis into the form of the signature’ and to ‘appropriate it under the proper name’ (1996: 207). 4 Like other kinds of property, names can be stolen. Corporations police their brand properties rigorously, punishing unauthorized appropriations and defacements. Private individuals receive alerts about identity theft. Indeed, stealing a name is an ancient form of magic. But if names can be stolen like any other kind of property, then perhaps it is still only names that can be taken in vain. Taken in vain: the phrase suggests at once the possibility of transgression against a sacred name and the vanity of thinking that a name can, in any conclusive sense, be ‘taken’ at all. For as we shall see, brand names clarify the extent to which names can only perform their remarkable magic by being at once less and more than they seem.

Strong but wrong

5 My story begins with a name that sounded strong but wrong.2 One of the big clients of the ad agency in which I was conducting my fieldwork in 1997-98 was a cellphone provider operating under the brand name BPL mobile. BPL mobile was a division of a larger Indian consumer electronics company called BPL Group. BPL Group, whose corporate slogan at that time was ‘Believe in the Best,’ had established itself in the field of household appliances during the 1980s, when new consumer technologies were becoming available to the Indian middle classes through joint ventures with foreign producers. BPL had forged a solid, reliable reputation as an Indian face for world-class products, bringing their customers ‘the best’ of what was available elsewhere at a time when foreign companies were not allowed to market their products under their own brand names in India. With liberalization, not only were an increasing number of those foreign brands now directly available in Indian stores (although generally at high prices) but, as a result, BPL’s image as a solid, reliable conduit of quality was also beginning to look unsexy: always there, adequate—in the Hindi phrase, chalta hai (good enough/it’ll do).

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6 Certainly my interlocutors in the ad agency felt that BPL Group’s homely image was holding the BPL mobile division back in its attempts to conjure the kind of hi-tech, global, exciting atmosphere that was in those days considered requisite for the cellphone category, which was still fairly new and small in India. The agency, in other words, had a major client on their hands that was operating in a product category that required a certain ‘voice,’ but doing so under a brand name that markedly lacked that voice. So the agency had moved decisively to, as it were, re-voice their client’s name, causing a splash for BPL mobile by launching a new product, an all-in-one ready-to-go pack containing a phone, a SIM card, and a charger, a product that the agency, after much back and forth, had given a new name: Mobile On the Spot. And the splash had started, as it must, with the client; the BPL mobile executives had been suitably dazzled and adrenalized by the agency’s presentation. 7 But now cooler heads were prevailing, and BPL mobile was worrying that Mobile On the Spot’s flashy vitality was ‘fighting with’ the BPL Group ‘motherbrand.’ Was there a risk that pouring money into advertising for the new product might turn Mobile On the Spot into a quasi-autonomous ‘sub-brand’ that would then, as the client so vividly put it, turn around and ‘cannibalize’ the motherbrand? During the agency’s initial creative process, Mobile On the Spot had not, in fact, been the first name to stick; earlier contenders had included Velocity and Contact. One of the reasons the ad agency manager preferred Mobile On the Spot was that it seemed more like a product descriptor than a potential (sub-)brand name. Compared to Contact, he said, it had a ‘retail feel’; it seemed most directly to express the plug-and-play promise of the new product. 8 There were other complications as well. A few months earlier BPL mobile had launched yet another product, a freestanding SIM card under the name InstaCard. Following the splashy launch of Mobile On the Spot, stocks of InstaCards were now languishing unsold in warehouses. One senior BPL mobile executive had proposed that this overstock now be repackaged in Mobile On the Spot look-alike packaging under the name BPL Mobile On the Spot InstaCard. Learning of this, the agency team objected that such a cumbersome concatenation of names would be inelegant and, moreover— this argument always worked with the client—divert attention from the motherbrand. Conceding the point, the BPL mobile executive then suggested that Mobile On the Spot be renamed in such a way as to reconcile it with InstaCard: why not kill two birds with one stone by calling the new product InstaMobile? ‘Obviously we said no,’ the copywriter told me the following day. ‘This would create the same problems as with Contact—you’re putting another sub-brand out there.’

Detachable vessels

9 In a mass-mediated society—that is to say, in a society premised on stranger-sociality— the reputation-bearing function of names becomes all the more important since each of us is, on a daily basis, expected to trust strangers with our money. Under conditions of mass mediation, brand names are, as Constantine Nakassis (2012, 2013) points out, eminently useful kinds of detachable semiotic vessels. They can circulate far and wide and yet always point back to a (putatively) stable brand essence. At the same time, through deftly managed brand extensions, a brand name should also, up to a point, be able to incorporate new products: Virgin begins as a record label and subsequently

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turns into not only a record store but also an airline, a publishing house, a line of hotels, a mobile phone service and so on. Branding, then, aspires to play a delicate game with singularity and multiplicity. A brand name is at once a mark of identity and a space of differentiation. Synchronically, at any given moment, it must be both organizing and capacious. Diachronically, over time, it must both remain loyal to its particular histories and open up to its potential futures.

10 When BPL mobile called a meeting with the agency at BPL corporate headquarters in central Mumbai to discuss the problem of ‘synergizing the retail segment,’ the agency team knew it was in a delicate situation. Certainly it wanted and needed to defend its baby, Mobile On the Spot. It knew that it was facing a client who was struggling to reconcile its lingering seduction by Mobile On the Spot with the quite different tonalities of its corporate brand. But the agency also had both short-term tactical and long-term strategic ambitions. Right now, it only handled BPL’s cellphone division. Short term, it made sense for the agency to encourage BPL mobile to create and advertise as many new products as possible. But if the agency could come across not only as the backer of Mobile On the Spot but also as a potential custodian of the larger corporate brand, then there might well be more and bigger business to be won from BPL in the future. And for that to happen, the BPL brand name had to stay just as much front and center as that of Mobile On the Spot or any other product. Effectively the agency team had to argue that, contrary to all palpable signs, there was no conflict between the BPL motherbrand and Mobile On the Spot—that they were, in some deep sense, ‘the same.’ And yet, in order to justify the existence of Mobile On the Spot as an entity deserving its own advertising rupees despite the risk of motherbrand cannibalization, the agency team also had to argue that there was a tactical difference between them. 11 The question was: did the name Mobile On the Spot designate a clearly distinct object? And if it did, then what kind of object was it? Ostensibly, this might seem a silly question. After all, there was a product and that product was, apparently, doing reasonably well. At the same time, Mobile On the Spot didn’t actually offer customers any new components; it merely recombined existing products—a SIM card, a phone, and a charger—in a more convenient way. In the agency-client meeting, the agency team struggled to clarify exactly what sort of thing their baby was, and thus the grounds on which its separate name might be established. Ambiguity reigned at every turn. Having launched Mobile On the Spot, the agency team noted, BPL mobile was bringing its customers a service, but not in the same sense as the service provision on which their brand was based. Yes, Mobile On the Spot was a product, but not in any really distinctive way, since each of its components was already available separately. Nor was the package aspect of Mobile On the Spot quite convincing enough. As a BPL mobile executive demanded, on the verge of desperation: ‘How can we justify pumping all this advertising money into launching what threatens to become a new sub-brand when it’s not even its own product?! Certainly it’s a package, but then so is everything else with packaging!’ 12 In its early meetings with BPL mobile, the need to define the distinct object-ness of Mobile On the Spot had not arisen, because, conscious of their client’s worry about brand integrity, the ad agency team had stressed that it was nothing more than a product descriptor and that customers would inevitably ask for the product by the client’s brand name: BPL mobile. In this way, the agency team had managed both to

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reassure the lead client executive about its respect for the integrity of the BPL brand and excite him with the racy new look that it had devised for Mobile On the Spot (‘very techno-fechno,’ as one member of the agency team had characterized it). But now this same client executive was concerned that if BPL mobile was going to commit substantial funds to advertising Mobile On the Spot, then it had better be future-proof: it should be able to accommodate future variations and extensions for different kinds of customers and occasions. But if it was that extendable, then was it not threatening to become a separate sub-brand rather than merely a product descriptor? Was it not, in short, threatening to become a proper name?

The symptom of the name

13 The very idea of a ‘sub-brand’ suggests an anxiety: a brand that is not supposed to be a brand, a non-brand that is brand-like.3 It hints at the excess that always threatens to disrupt the self-identity of the brand name qua proper name, to destabilize its quality of, to use Saul Kripke’s (1980) famous phrase, rigid designation. Proper names, according to Kripke, are rigid designators because they designate the same thing in all possible worlds. Rigid designation is less a fixed characteristic of proper names than a potentially profitable aspiration toward semiotic stability, more or less coherently achieved. Brand names help us to see that this stability is not so much a relation of reference (a name referring to an object) as what early anthropologists of religion and magic, for example Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, called participation. Elsewhere I have written at length against the pejorative associations that continue to cloud our reception of these ideas (Mazzarella forthcoming).

14 For my purposes here, we need only remind ourselves of Emile Durkheim’s (1995) classic argument about totemism. Durkheim argued that the power of the totemic sign, which we may take as a kind of proper name, does not depend on it referring to the animals or plants from which it takes its name, or to the human individuals that identify with (belong to) a particular totem. Rather there is a necessary relation of common substance, a relation of participation, between all of them, marked and coordinated by the totemic sign qua—to use Kripke’s term anachronistically—rigid designator. In a similar way, brand name variants (BPL Group, BPL mobile and so on) participate in, and thus also designate, the commodity instances of the brand (various products, some with their own names: Mobile On the Spot, InstaCard etc., as well as the various graphic and sensory properties associated with the brand). 15 Participation involves a curious mixture of singularity and relation. At one level, the proper name refers only to itself; it is necessarily self-evident. In our constructivist times, names still carry an untimely aura of the thing-in-itself; some names are thought to be ‘truer’ than others (Pina-Cabral 2010). True names may often be protected by ‘shield’ names (Das, this collection). One offers up a shield name for generalized circulation, thus keeping the intimate authenticity of the true name safe from the malevolence it might attract. At another level, then, names must circulate, must ‘talk to’ and articulate with other names. Theodor Adorno (2006) once observed that a truly proper name would have property only in itself; it would be self-identical to the point of utter non-identity. It would be useless in the best sense—that is to say, it would be entirely unavailable for any human purpose. That would be its frustration and its delight: expression without exchange.

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16 Such an ideal of a name resistant to all trafficking, to all truck and barter, arises from the threat of injury implicit in the circulation of names as tokens of value and identification in a currency over which we may have little control. My name opens me to the world, makes me vulnerable to hostile magic. Judith Butler (1997) and others point out that there is always a kind of violence in naming—the violence of interpellation, of subjectivation and subjection; indeed, Butler notes, the very phrase ‘name-calling’ refers in English to insulting someone. But in order to function socially, my proper name must constantly risk commonness—or, as brand managers anxiously put it, ‘genericide.’ If the intimate properness of my name opens me to the world, then its tendency toward commonness also opens the world to me. Names are, in this sense, hinges. Modern governmentality is only possible because names translate singularity into relation and vice versa. As Alain Badiou puts it: ‘The name is what allows singularity to assert its worth beyond itself’ (2007: 104; see also Vom Bruck and Bodenhorn 2006). My signature allows the law to recognize and record me in my singularity, but it also inserts me, bureaucratically, into an order of equivalence where I am one among others. My name can be a passport to my rights as a citizen, but it will also pin me down as an object of surveillance and tie me to my guilt. 17 The ‘truth’ or ‘authenticity’ of a name is at stake in its circulation. This is why names— personal names as well as brand names—are such powerful and delicate vehicles of reputation. The public disintegration of a reputation can be shocking and painful, not simply because the implosion of a name brings about what is arrestingly called a ‘loss of face,’ but also because, as Aditya Bharadwaj suggestively notes in his contribution to this collection, the public coming apart of a name often involves an unpredictable activation of its constituent elements, now disarticulated from the previously rigid structure of the solid name. ‘Names and naming,’ Bharadwaj writes, ‘by their very nature consecrate through a process of inscription and encryption.’ Inscription and encryption: the very same organizing principle (inscription) that allows the name to designate also, as it were, secretes a virtual or ‘unconscious’ dimension of the name (encryption) with a life of its own that is nevertheless constitutive of the actual life of the name. 18 We are all familiar with dramatic moments of shaming, scandals in which the name of an individual or a corporation melt down, ‘become dirt.’ But the power and vulnerability embedded in this double relation of inscription and encryption is not just relevant to sudden moments of breakdown or collapse. It is, rather, a permanent feature of the vitality and vulnerability of names in their everyday circulation. Slavoj Žižek (2012) observes that the name of even a common noun is at once external to the features of the thing it describes and yet somehow also condenses and embodies its irreducible, un-enumerable intimate essence. The name, to invoke a Lacanian phrase, is ‘what is in the named object more than itself.’ For Žižek, a name is symptomatic, then, both in the sense that it is quintessentially characteristic of what it names, and in the sense that there is something excessive in it, something that obtrudes or insists beyond the (apparently) simple work of reference. This constitutive excess of the name is, as we shall see, both key to its fascination and a constant threat to its integrity. As a delicate hinge between singularity and relation, the proprius of the name must be ritually managed, whether by explicitly legal conventions that define how and when we may lay claim to names or by observances and prohibitions that performatively reproduce their auratic singularity.

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Regimentation and proliferation

19 The semiotic regimentation of a brand extends to its human custodians. I recall, for instance, an occasion during my dissertation fieldwork in Mumbai when, arriving with a group of ad executives at an event sponsored by one of the agency’s clients, I was instructed, sotto voce, by one of my companions to get rid of a can of Coke I had been carrying, even though the event we were attending was not sponsored by one of Coke’s competitors. The unstated assumption was that because the agency serviced the account of Canada Dry (then owned by Cadbury Schweppes), its executives—and, by further extension, incidental associates like me—could not be seen in a professional context to be associated with the Coke brand name.

20 And yet even the most basic brand publicity involves something more and something less than a conscientiously regimented semiotic space. As Nakassis shows, branded publicity is inherently (self-)citational. And each branded citation (each appearance of the brand name in advertising and on products) performatively proliferates what Nakassis calls ‘brand surfeits’—the ‘more than’ of a brand, unruly potentials that both power the vital aura of the brand and defeat any attempts definitively to discipline its meaning. Perhaps one might say that brand surfeits are the actualized forms taken by the brand name’s inevitable symptomatic eruptions. But do these surfeit eruptions trouble or ground the proprius of the name? 21 Nakassis’ examples of brand surfeits include counterfeits, brand parodies, fakes and so on—surfeit actualizations that, as it were, ‘speak back’ to the official brand, sometimes in its ‘own’ name, sometimes in satirical impersonation of its voice. Thinking with Jacques Derrida (1995), we might propose that when brands ‘give’ their names to their rightful progeny, the goods that are legally authorized to carry their name, they also become narcissistically vulnerable to acts of separation, violations of the name in the name of the brand. But even here, as Nakassis shows, the relation between brand success and brand failure is ambiguous. For all that brand managers worry about unauthorized appropriations, for all that corporations jealously and expensively police the circulation of their brands, the proliferation of counterfeits may divert some customers away from the authorized product while at the same time heightening the prestige of ‘the real thing.’ For brand names, too, imitation may be the sincerest form of flattery. If brand surfeits in a sense belong to the brand name, then the real challenge to brand management may not be, as it were, brand identity theft so much as the difficulty of insisting on the externality and otherness (i.e. the non-participation) of the fake vis-à-vis the original. 22 The difficulty of drawing a clean ontological boundary between the brand name original and the spinoffs that its surfeits may permit is not merely a function of its circulation. Or rather one might say that a brand name is, as it were, always already ‘precirculated’: its surfeits are not just the sparks that the brand name throws off as it touches down in various social contexts. They may also be imagined as the activations of potentials—encryptions, to use Bharadwaj’s term—that live in a shared sensuous- mimetic context and that necessarily shadow the inscription of the name on whose wings they take flight. 23 The relation of participation that grounds the brand name as a rigid designator tends to come with its own myths of origin about a constitutive and deliberate moment of

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naming. Kripke calls it : an act that combines a gesture of indication with the giving of a name; his example is pointing to a star and saying ‘That is to be Alpha Centauri.’ This is also how branding is popularly imagined, as if, in some leisurely strategic panopticon, advertising and marketing professionals simply find the name and brand positioning that best ‘fits’ a fully formed product. It is an image of virgin illumination, innocent of history. The reality is a great deal messier. Brand names generally arise quite literally in medias res, in the middle of things, in a hectic competitive field, through a process that is part improvisatory divination, part bricolage. This is why we must, I think, read Kripke’s baptism scenario as mythical and ideological, a story that is retroactively told in order to lend an authorizing origin and stability to the unsteady social career of a name. 24 Perhaps the complementary opposite of Kripke’s baptism, in which a mute object passively receives its name and thus, as it were, comes alive, is Adorno’s evocation of a living world that already contains its own names, challenging us to achieve a mode of sensuous attunement in which we would be able to receive them. Tellingly, for Adorno, the bearers of true names address us wordlessly: ‘In existing without any purpose recognizable to men, animals hold out, as if for expression, their own names, utterly impossible to exchange’ (Adorno 2006: 228). That Adorno then proceeds to observe: ‘This makes [animals] so beloved of children, their contemplation so blissful’ (ibid) leads one to suspect that he is invoking that spontaneously transformative mimetic faculty that Walter Benjamin (1999) found undimmed in children. If animals hold out ‘their own names’ to us, then we must apprehend them aesthetically rather than by means of referential labels. To those who can listen, then, language-less animals, so often brutally subjected to the names humans have given them, speak their true names. 25 For Adorno, of course, brand names embodied the very opposite of such sensuously available truth. Brand names involved a kind of prostitution of language, a promiscuous hollowing-out of the name, ubiquity without content, sentiment without life, a puppet performance of authenticity; in short, an absolute instrumentalization of the name in the service of a rationalized marketing apparatus. As with so much in Adorno’s critique of the administered society and the culture industry, one gets the sense of a radical fantasy of perfected law, of rationalization without remainder: a world in which rigid designation had been fully and permanently achieved. But there is no reason to suppose that brand names are any less vulnerable to the symptomatic instability of surfeits than any other kind of name. If anything—and I want to read Adorno against himself here—Adorno’s invocation of an aesthetic attunement to the names that, as it were, already dwell in the world helps us to understand the tactile and tactical improvisations of brand-work.

Divination

26 To imagine that the name Mobile On the Spot referred primarily to the physical package containing a cellphone, a SIM card, and a charger would be to miss the point. Of course the physical package became one of the commodity instances of the name, but the vitality, the texture, the voice of the name—the ‘substance’ in which all of its elements participated—existed at first only in the most virtual way: as a kind of affective potentiality awaiting concrete actualization.

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27 The first step toward actualizing that substance was, one could say, a kind of exploratory divination. The agency team was painfully aware of the assertiveness with which BPL mobile’s competitor in Mumbai (at that time, each urban cellphone market in India had two providers), MaxTouch, had been able to seize control of a desirably dynamic semiotic space. The agency wanted to conjure a similar (but of course also different) magic for BPL mobile. The challenge was to ‘lighten up’ some of the BPL motherbrand’s perceived stolidity while not confusing BPL mobile’s offerings with the brand elements—colours, fonts, graphic signatures—of MaxTouch. 28 The copywriters and art directors on the account spent a great deal of time, together and alone, feeling their way through textual and visual elements that might capture and convey the identity-space of what would become Mobile On the Spot, which at first had neither a name nor a solid description. Gradually, as ideas were batted back and forth, both the conceptual contour of the space—‘survival in a harsh urban environment’—and the name that would designate that conceptual contour began to crystallize. Typically, the process involved the creative team flipping through stock image catalogs or advertising compendia from Europe and the United States, testing their hunches and impulses against existing institutions, honing their intuitions toward something that felt right when articulated. It wasn’t that the team was looking for ideas to copy. Rather, it was absorbed in a kind of generative contemplation—one might say, a state of mimetic receptivity—in which the client’s brief and the team members’ own aesthetic intuitions were allowed to rub up against an existing set of images so as to release surfeits that might then be translated into something that, retroactively, would appear all long to have been the perfect name for and articulation of an object that, for now, existed only virtually. 29 Nor did this mimetic divination end once the product parameters—name, graphic look, packaging etc.—had been decided and were being presented to the client. Except for during the most tightly scripted parts of these presentations, the agency team’s interaction with the client team similarly involved a great deal of improvisatory surfeit-conjuring and tea leaf-reading. All kinds of associations and connotations would be evoked, taken up, and dropped. Like good fortune tellers, the members of the agency team were constantly monitoring the client team for the slightest cues, using the latter’s facial expressions and incipient utterances as cues for on-the-fly adjustments to and translations of a series of advertising inputs that, all the while, had to seem like they were expressing a consistent idea. While one could easily dismiss such behaviour as commercially motivated sycophancy, I think it would be more useful to acknowledge its mobile and highly sensitive divinatory aspect. Rather than having baptized a fully- formed object, the agency and its client had found a name for an approximate affect, and were now collectively engaged in ‘reading’ each other in such a way as to produce a set of image and text objects that the name might designate in a way that would feel at once pleasurable and necessary. 30 In a sense both agency and client teams were like participants at a séance, mediums actualizing the virtual potentialities of a shared mimetic archive. The personified spirit invoked in the séance was ‘the consumer’—a putatively objective anchor for what might otherwise seem an entirely arbitrary process of invention. Both agency and client executives would summon ‘the consumer’ at key moments of uncertainty, with a rhetorical air of finality that was generally not supported by any external evidence. Very often, as we shall see in the following vignette, ‘the consumer’ served, as it were,

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to bring third-person social ‘grounding’ or ‘perspective’ to hunches that either the client or the agency team might speculatively and ‘subjectively’ offer in the self- referential indexical first person. At the same time, in these meetings, the ‘I’ of the speaker would often slide in and out of direct identification with the imagined or reported ‘I’ of ‘the consumer.’ Either way, these conversations involved a delicate dance between an invocation of external third-person authority and charismatic- performative first-person attempts to make this external authority align with— participate in—the object that was emerging in the room (cf Urban 1987).4 The objective ‘reality’ of two entities and their mutual alignment was at stake here: that of the branded object and that of the consuming subject. 31 BPL mobile had, as we have already seen, woken up with a hangover from its initial intoxication with Mobile On the Spot, anxious about the same vital potential that had initially seemed so attractive, but which now seemed to threaten the emergence of a surfeit with a life/name of its own: a sub-brand. Consequently, one of the lead BPL mobile executive’s first gambits in the post-launch meeting with the agency was to insist that any customer, walking into a retail outlet, was going to ask for the brand name that they already knew, and which differentiated BPL mobile, along a chain of equivalence, from its competitor. So why risk muddying the waters by promoting another name, Mobile On the Spot? As the conversation gradually grew heated, the BPL mobile executive fell back—for greater emphasis but also appealing across the table to a presumptively shared habitus—on a first-person situation: ‘Let’s say I go into a shop and I want to buy a Walkman, na?’ Clicking his tongue impatiently, the agency manager interrupted him right away: ‘Bad example, yaar. It’s become generic.’ Abandoning analogies, the BPL mobile executive then resorted to a simple first-person claim to common sense: ‘What I’m saying is, I’m not going to ask for ‘BPL Mobile On the Spot’— it’s too much of a mouthful.’ Frustrated, the agency manager retorted, almost recklessly: ‘Yes you will!’ 32 At this point, holding up his hand with an air of Apollonian panopsis, an account executive from the agency team intervened by trying to shift the conversation, via an invocation of the ever-available ‘consumer,’ back to the objective feel of the third person—without any evidentiary support other than, again, a tone of calm common sense: ‘Hold on. Whether it’s becoming a sub-brand for you and me, it’s not for the consumer.’ The BPL mobile executive, sticking doggedly to the performative promise of his first person extrapolation, insisted: ‘I’m not going to go in and ask for ‘BPL Mobile On the Spot.’ I’ll go in and ask for BPL mobile.’ The agency manager, having recovered his composure, was alive to the psychological importance of allowing his client to assume a first-person perspective in any conversation involving his brand. That way, the client would feel like he ‘owned’ the potentials and pitfalls that any vision of the future might suggest. Accordingly, the agency manager stuck with second person address as a way of trying to shift his client’s first-person anxiety toward a more expansive horizon: ‘Yes today you’ll ask for BPL mobile,’ he began by reassuring his client, before smoothly transitioning into a vision of brand extensions to come, each requiring their own designators albeit not their own brands: ‘But tomorrow? Tomorrow you might have two, three different cards. You might have the pastel phones especially for the ladies. You might have the hep phone only with local calls for the teens. I don’t know what-all you’ll have. But what are you going to ask for then?’ The BPL mobile executive acknowledged the point, but, to collective howls of protest

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from the agency team, proceeded to deduce that by that logic the product should be advertised as ‘BPL Mobile Mobile On the Spot.’

I, the brand

33 Marketing is generally imagined as the art/science that facilitates encounters between consumer-subjects and branded objects. In the previous section, I showed how attempts to settle both the content and the coherence of the branded object were inextricable from attempts both to invoke and—by means of theatrical and projective uses of the first person (Urban 1987)—to enact and inhabit the consumer-subject who might desire it.

34 But what about the branded object as subject? Is the brand name not, after all, the name in which the corporation addresses its publics and thus a kind of prosthetic self? As I note in Shoveling Smoke, advertising executives routinely identify quite intimately with the brands for whom they may be long-term custodians, priding themselves on understanding the voice in which the brand ‘speaks’ and the kinds of inputs it ‘needs.’ Agencies sometimes inculcate such brand identification in their employees by running games in which executives and creatives are expected to act in the name of the brand, identifying, from a range of options and with as little hesitation as possible, words, images, and situations that characterize ‘their’ brand. 35 Marketing theory, of course, routinely metaphorizes brands as people. Textbooks refer to brand personalities, brands are imagined as speaking in certain kinds of voices, the brand-consumer relation is explicated and cultivated by analogy to interpersonal relations, and focus groups are commonly asked to imagine the brands with which they interact as human types. But it is as if we encounter an uneasy crossing point when we move from the third to the first person. As long as the game sticks to the third person (referring to the brand as ‘it’ or even, tongue in cheek, ‘he’ or ‘she’), we may playfully invoke accusations of commodity fetishism while all the time resting assured that we are dealing in ‘mere’ metaphor. Things feel stickier, though, when the ‘I’ of the human speaker blends with the ‘I’ of the brand. But why should they? After all, as Greg Urban notes, ‘the “I” of discourse is not only an actual in-the-world subject, indexically referred to by means of the first person form. The discourse “I” can also be any being or entity, imaginary or not, capable of being reported as a speaker’ (Urban 1987: 29). What boundary does first person speech in the name of the brand trouble? 36 The theory of commodity fetishism would suggest that to speak of the ‘I’ of the brand is to commit a fatal act of ontological confusion: attributing life and subjectivity to inanimate things, and thus facilitating our own complementary reification. By this logic, a brand name, as Adorno might have said, lends a sham appearance of interiority to something that hovers between a speaking object and an artificial person. We may of course give a proper name to an inanimate object. Indeed, Kripke’s ideal-typical baptism scenario proceeds in the third person: ‘that is to be Alpha Centauri.’ Its success does not require any attentiveness or agreement on the part of Alpha Centauri. But personal names are, apparently, quite different in this regard (assuming they are not given posthumously). 37 Jean-Claude Milner (n.d., 2010) notes, developing an Althusserian-Lacanian line of thought, that our human emergence as singular and unique speaking beings requires a first-person assumption of our names, that is to say the ability to connect our names

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with the act of saying ‘I.’ But this first-person assumption of a name depends, in turn, on a temporally prior interpellating address in the second person: ‘by imposing a proper name on the infant in the second person, one constitutes it as a speaking being and therefore as being capable of speaking in the first person’ (Milner 2010: 16). But the crucial point is that this process of interpellation requires a retroactive reversal from the standpoint of the speaking subject: ‘the initial moment in time is the second person, but the foundational moment for the subject is in the first person’ (ibid). Here, then, is another perspective on the uncanny combination of lack and excess that seems to dwell at the heart of names: in order for me to assume first-person proprietorship over my name—in order for me to say ‘I’ in its name—I must repress the priority of another time, a time when my name was addressed to ‘me’ but it was not yet mine, a time when it did not yet ground the subjective unity of ‘I’ and ‘me.’ We should not regard the first-person assumption of our names as a once-and-for-all process, achieved and settled in childhood. Shoring up the propriety of our names against and within their constitutive other time is a lifelong project. Here, too, brand name-work is instructive. 38 As I describe in detail in Shoveling Smoke (and as any viewer of the AMC television series Mad Men will know), an advertising agency team sells an idea to its client by means of a carefully calibrated, part-improvised performance in which the purpose is not simply to convince the client that the proposed advertising solution is a good idea but also, more profoundly, to interpellate the members of the client team via their tendency/ desire to identify with the corporate ‘I’ of the brand name they represent and, in a sense, embody. In Lacanian terms, the agency seeks to move the client, without interruption, from an imaginary identification with the visual-affective contours of the proposed advertising materials to a symbolic lamination of the product image onto the already-interlaced relation between the ‘I’ of the client and the first-person name of its brand. 39 As we have already seen, the process involves a fascinating oscillation between third, second, and first-person deployments of the brand name. As a third-person entity the brand, like the putative ‘consumer,’ generally already exists. It has a history that can be invoked, whether as inspiration or as challenge. It has accreted a reputation that can be documented and explored through market research, whose findings can be strategically mobilized when necessary and dismissed when distracting. And the ‘I’ of the client is, as noted, already identified with the voice of the brand. Consequently, it becomes easy for the agency team to address the client-as-the-brand in the second person while—and this is the interesting part—at the same time sliding in and out of third and first person invocations of the brand. 40 In this exercise at one level the client is the brand and is acknowledged as the one who rightfully speaks in its name. And yet what the agency is simultaneously doing while presenting its ideas is conjuring the brand as an entity whose true essence resides elsewhere, an essence that, through the agency’s discerning work, can, in a more focused form, be channeled back into the client’s first person speech as the brand. In order to achieve this, the agency team will shift back and forth between third person expressions of the brand (‘BPL mobile is…’) and first person enactments of the brand voice/attitude/idea (‘I’m the kind of guy who…’). This becomes possible because the implicit assumption is that the brand name does not so much refer to an existing place,

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object, or person as organize a space in which particular potentials can be desirably and impressively actualized. 41 Veena Das remarks, in her contribution to the present collection, that when it comes to names, ‘The issue is not that of reference—how does a proper name refer—but rather of reaching into the open texture of the name through which a range of affects can be condensed and presented all at once without need of further description.’ The work of branding renders particularly acute the tension between the two aspects of Das’ reflection on names: the sense of an active potentiation of affects (‘reaching into the open texture of the name’) and the sense of self-evidence (‘without need of further description’). When names circulate, as they must, something unpredictable comes alive—there is, in Nakassis’ terms, a proliferation of surfeits—and yet, paradoxically, this proliferation can only happen through the protocols and rituals through which we try to manage the integrity of names as rigid designators.

A clearing appears

42 Returning to Bharadwaj’s vocabulary in the light of the preceding discussion, one might perhaps say that the inscription of subjectivity that allows us to speak in our ‘own’ names simultaneously encrypts, within that named subjectivity, the unconscious of the name. The symptomatic eruptions of this unconscious of the name—‘what is in the name more than itself’—take rather different forms when a name is functioning well than when it fails. To the successful name, the eruptions of its encrypted side add that quality of authentically numinous aura, ‘a phenomenon of distance, however close it may be’ (Benjamin 1968: 222). The constitutive ‘other histories’ of the name—the ones that are foreclosed in order for it to speak in the first person—remain as a kind of depth echo, adding gravitas but not disrupting the name’s successful (re-)inscription. The collapsing name or the name that never quite wants to come together is, by contrast, suddenly and very obviously riddled by surfeits that it cannot master, and that stand in the way of its plausible first person articulation.

43 This was the crisis faced by the advertising agency team in the wake of Mobile On the Spot’s attention-grabbing debut. Having devised a name for its client, and initially generated the kind of client euphoria that every agency lives for, all involved were now looking at a name that seemed, vis-à-vis the all-important BPL motherbrand, all surfeit and no identity. Formally, the problem seemed to be one of irreconcilable semiotics and thus non-participation in the name. In its own defense, the agency team certainly felt that the problem arose in large part from the incoherence of its client’s desire: a desire to speak through a new name in the name of the old name. After several exhausting iterations of the debate as to whether Mobile On the Spot had any reason to exist as a separate product name, whether it was turning into a sub-brand, whether ‘the consumer’ was going to ask for it or not and so on, the lead BPL mobile executive called a break and left the conference room. The agency team retreated into a tactical huddle. 44 One of the account executives sensed more trouble ahead. Recently, BPL mobile had started toying with the idea of rebranding its retail outlets as Mobile Spots. Leaning in, the account executive whispered urgently to his boss, the agency manager, regarding the client’s new plan: ‘Achcha, he’s coming from two directions here. You’re the only one who can get him out. He’s going to complain that there’s a lack of consistency between [the previously launched freestanding SIM card] InstaCard and Mobile On the

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Spot when it comes to the retail outlets. Only one of these is about spots!’ The remark had the intended effect on the agency manager, who blurted indignantly: ‘But come on, yaar! We can’t be in a situation where our branding efforts are determined by the name of the retail outlets!’ 45 At this moment, the BPL mobile executive returned to the room. The agency manager was still fired up and, in a brilliant maneuver, turned the scenario around so as to convince the client of the inherent absurdity of insisting that the names of all aspects of the operation be coordinated: ‘Look at an example from your own organization,’ he rallied. ‘BPL Galleries. What do they sell? The whole range of products. Doesn’t mean that I have to call the products ‘Gallery.’’ In his turn suitably horrified, the BPL executive protested: ‘No, no—that’s nothing more than a coincidence!’ 46 The stratagem was as absurd as it was inspired. By stretching the name-participation outward to such a degree of encompassment that it began to look preposterous (a world in which every single aspect of BPL’s activities had to bear the same single name), the agency team was able to relieve the pressure on the smaller semiotic zone where name-participation had until that moment seemed crucial. Some room for maneuver had been cleared, even while nothing about the long-term strategic problem had been solved. Tactically, the splintering surfeits of the two names at issue—BPL mobile and Mobile On the Spot—now allowed a different aspect to dawn (see Das, this collection). 47 The agency-client meeting was taking place a month or so before Diwali, the festival of light, and traditionally the beginning of the Hindu season. The agency account executive saw his chance to realign sense and sensibility and grabbed it. Was not Mobile On the Spot the perfect happy/sad wedding gift from parents to their departing daughter, accentuating both her tentative independence and her indelible connection to her natal household? And did not such a positioning resonate perfectly with the benign if slightly boring affect of the BPL motherbrand as the long-standing quality custodian of Indian consumer interests? Never mind that a mobile phone was, at best, an ambiguous gift (who was, in the end, going to pay for the calls?) If only for a season, the agency had managed to conjure a plausible participation under their client’s name, and everyone seated around the table could breathe a sigh of relief and begin looking forward to shooting an exceptionally emotive TV commercial.

Conclusion: im/proprieties

48 Wherein lies, then, the im/propriety of brand names? Perhaps first and most of all in the way that the work of branding so clearly discloses the im/propriety of proper names in general. The power of names would seem, as I have been suggesting throughout this paper, to rest on something rather more ambiguous than simple referential ‘fit.’ And yet of course the feeling that a name ‘fits’ what it names is an important part of the everyday phenomenology of names. It allows names to seem ‘right’ in both a propositional and a moral sense. This aspiration to the fitting name, but also the sense of fit as substantial participation rather than reference, comes across loud and clear in Sean Dowdy’s remark, elsewhere in this collection, regarding normative expectations in Mayong: ‘Recall that personal names and their embodied subjects are meant to become the same thing over time’ (original emphasis).

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49 The peculiarity of brand names is not that they work by means of a more or less successful sense of participation—this is true, I would suggest, of all proper names. Brand names, however, have to do more: they must continuously solicit the active and interested engagement of those whose attention they seek. Any of us might desire acknowledgment and recognition of our names. But brand names solicit our participation in their names while at the same time asserting sovereign control over their names. In Shoveling Smoke, I extended Annette Weiner’s (1992) work on inalienable objects by suggesting that we think of this as the ‘keeping-while-giving’ of the brand. My argument then was that branding forges an inalienable singularity out of the alienable proliferation of commodities: it allows the corporation to ‘keep’ the brand while ‘giving’ the commodity. 50 But in the larger project I was also trying to show—as I have in this paper—that branding ‘strategy’ cannot be quite as immaculate as its boosters as well as its critics tend to imagine. I am not saying that branding must bend to real consumer desire—that would presume, as marketing theory must, that consumer desire is knowable prior to its actualization vis-à-vis specific products and brands (Mazzarella forthcoming). Rather, brands invite us to join a collective game of potentiation, a game of activating brand surfeits. We all do the work, but corporations and advertising agencies then do their best to harness and narrativize that work around a name over which they can assert legal ownership and sovereign custody. But as we have seen here, owning a name is quite a different matter from speaking coherently in a name. 51 I have also suggested in this paper that we need to think beyond the conventional commodity fetishism argument, according to which the im/propriety of brand names has to do with their illegitimate , their pretense at first person subjectivity. Behind the ‘artificial I’ of the brand lies, we like to think, another, supposedly ‘real’ puppet-master ‘I’: the ‘I’ of the corporation, the voice of capital. This ‘I’ is also, of course, a legal fiction, and serves, on dubious grounds, to grant the agents of capital the prerogatives and protections of personhood. But having acknowledged that, we are then faced with the question of what kind of ‘real’ personhood is presumed to attach to human names, to ‘actual’ persons? Here too, the im/propriety of proper names does its ambiguous work. 52 Tellingly, the idea that the brand-self designated by the brand name is malleably artificial (by implied contrast to the real selves designated by real names) is just as central to ideology-critical takes on consumer capitalism as it is to marketing theory. One might say that the apparent contingency and artificiality of brand names serves as an alibi for the implied necessity and stability of personal names. Having decided that brand names are essentially ventriloquists’ dummies, media through which other agents ‘throw their voices,’ we can then continue to believe that there are self- grounding subjects with real names and real interests on either side of the brand curtain. By being paradigmatically artificial, brand names help to underwrite the proprius of proper names, including those corporate proper names that are granted the legal authority of persons.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

Adorno, Theodor (2006 [1951]) Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life, New York: Verso.

Althusser, Louis (2001 [1970]) ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatus (Notes Towards an Investigation)’, in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, New York: Monthly Review Press, pp. 85– 126.

Badiou, Alain (2007 [2005]) The Century, Cambridge: Polity Press.

Benjamin, Walter (1999 [1933]) ‘On the Mimetic Faculty’, in Michael Jennings (ed.), Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 2, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, pp. 720–27.

Benjamin, Walter (1968 [1936]) ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, in Illuminations, New York: Schocken, pp. 217–51.

Butler, Judith (1997) Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative, New York: Routledge.

Coombe, Rosemary (1996) ‘Embodied Trademarks: Mimesis and Alterity on American Commercial Frontiers’, Cultural Anthropology 11(2), pp. 202–24.

Derrida, Jacques (1995) On the Name, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Durkheim, Emile (1995 [1912]) The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, New York: Free Press.

Kripke, Saul (1980 [1972]) Naming and Necessity, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Mazzarella, William (2003) Shoveling Smoke: Advertising and Globalization in Contemporary India, Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Mazzarella, William (forthcoming) The Mana of Mass Publicity: Anthropology Lost and Found.

Milner, Jean-Claude (n.d.) ‘Remarks on the Name Jew and the Universal’ [Online], URL: http:// mcpress.media-commons.org/postmedieval_middleages_holocaust/jean-claude-milner-remarks- on-the-name-jew-and-the-universal-translated-by-robert-s-kawashima/ [accessed December 29, 2014].

Milner, Jean-Claude; Banfield, Ann; Heller-Roazen, Daniel (2010) ‘Interview with Jean-Claude Milner’, Journal of the Jan van Eyck Circle for Lacanian Ideology Critique, 3, pp. 4–21.

Nakassis, Constantine (2012) ‘Brand, Citationality, Performativity’, American Anthropologist 114(4), pp. 624–38.

Nakassis, Constantine (2013) ‘Brands and their Surfeits’, Cultural Anthropology 28(1), pp. 111–26.

Urban, Greg (1987) ‘The “I” of Discourse’, Working Papers and Proceedings of the Center for Psychosocial Studies, Chicago, 10: pp. 27–51.

Vom Bruck, Gabriele; Bodenhorn, Barbara (eds.) (2006) The Anthropology of Names and Naming, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Weiner, Annette (1992) Inalienable Possessions: The Paradox of Keeping-While-Giving, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

Žižek, Slavoj (2012) Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism, New York: Verso.

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NOTES

1. The world that sustains the power of particular names may dissolve, but it never quite dies. There was no explicit or written agreement, when I did my dissertation fieldwork, about what I was or was not allowed to do with names in my writing. At the time of writing up, I improvised a series of decisions that felt reasonable. Broadly, if informants were speaking to me on the record, for example in a formal interview situation, I would quote them and the brands they discussed by their real names. Conversely, I felt that much of what transpired inside the advertising agency where I did my fieldwork took place, as it were, backstage and should therefore be granted the protection of pseudonyms or generic names: ‘the agency,’ ‘the account executive,’ and so on. (I must confess to a certain enjoyment in dreaming up some of the brand pseudonyms. BPL, for instance, originally stood for British Physical Laboratories. ‘My’ BPL, consequently, became EMW —which in my mind stood for English Mechanical Workshop. Certainly these are acts of baptism in themselves—perhaps more so than anything that took place in the ‘real world’ situations I describe). In writing the present paper I have revealed only the real names of the brand and product at issue—BPL and Mobile On the Spot—on the principle that so much has changed in the Indian marketplace since I wrote Shoveling Smoke, including some of the brand names, that disclosing these names will not offend anyone. In any case, those familiar with the world that I discuss here and in my first book would be able to deduce what brands I was writing about and, if they are industry insiders, perhaps also which people served as my informant protagonists. This is an inevitable side effect of working in the mass publicity business. I would only add that the generic terms that I use for my informants in discussing these materials are not only meant as anonymizing devices; they are also supposed to highlight the structural rather than the personal dimensions of my informants’ work. 2. Some of the elements in this story appear under other names in Shoveling Smoke. 3. Thanks to Costas Nakassis for this formulation. 4. Greg Urban’s (1987) discussion of ‘anaphoric,’ ‘de-quotative,’ ‘theatrical’ and ‘projective’ uses of the first person pronoun has been extremely clarifying for me in making sense of the supple ways in which, in agency-client meetings, invocations of the first person could have, as it were, both first-person and third-person effects. My analysis departs from Urban’s, however, in wanting to stress that these first person usages go both ways. On the one hand, as Urban emphasizes, they serve to align the speaker with a more or less ‘fixed’ impression of an impersonal cultural code, a way in which things ‘are done’ and ‘are said.’ On the other hand, I want to suggest, this ‘culture’—whatever its actual formally elaborated narrative forms—is perhaps less like a code than like a virtual matrix. As such, it is not just that, for example, the ‘theatrical ‘I’’ aligns the speaker with a set of more or less rigid cultural expectations—what Urban (36) glosses as ‘the weight of tradition.’ It also provides a charismatic-performative opportunity to actualize the virtual potentials of the cultural matrix (what I would call the mimetic archive) differently—all the while lending it the appearance of pre-existing authority.

ABSTRACTS

This paper asks what kind of modifications we might have to make to our conventional understandings of proper names to accommodate the im/propriety of brand names. On the basis of ethnographic research on a naming crisis at a Mumbai advertising agency, I suggest that the

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classic anthropological notion of ‘participation’ (as opposed to reference) allows us to consider the play between baptism and the mimetic activation of virtual potentials that characterizes the public life of brand names. I argue for moving beyond the distinction between ‘artificial’ and ‘real’ proper names sustained by the theory of commodity fetishism, and propose instead that the supposed artificiality of brand identities has come to operate as an alibi for the unsteady authenticity of personal identities.

INDEX

Keywords: brand names, proper names, reference, participation, mimesis

AUTHOR

WILLIAM MAZZARELLA

Professor, University of Chicago

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Signboards and the Naming of Small Businesses: Personhood and Dissimulation in a Sri Lankan Market Town

Luke Alexander Heslop

AUTHOR'S NOTE

I would like to thank Veena Das and Jacob Copeman for inviting me to contribute something from Sri Lanka to this fascinating project. I am grateful for the comments and suggestions I received from the Centre for South Asian Studies at the University of Edinburgh, where I presented an early manifestation of this material in the faculty seminar. This paper has been much improved by generous comments from Garrett Field, Heid Jerstad, and Siobhan Magee. Asha Abeyasekera, Tudor Silva, and Dileepa Witharana helped me with a number of translations and caste-specific name interpretations. As ever, I am indebted to too many mudalalis to name.

1 ‘Gedara yana gaman! (On your way home!)’ written in both Sinhala and English is the tagline on the signboard of the Cargill’s Food City supermarket. The Cargill’s franchise is ubiquitous across Sri Lanka, and with its outdoor parking spaces, staff uniforms, conveyer belt checkout, and conditioned air, the branch in the hot and dusty junction town of Dambulla quickly became popular, particularly among the town’s aspiring middle class. Tacitly understood that ‘On your way home’ meant on your way home from work, the tagline on the signboard invites Cargill’s customers in Dambulla to participate in a world of modern consumption somewhat disconnected from the design of local life. To pull into a modern supermarket on the drive home to get a few items, presumably in time for the evening meal, was an image that seemed incommensurate with what I had experienced to be the general run of events in everyday life in and around the town. People got fresh ingredients from local markets called polas, bought

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items such as soap, toothpaste, and shampoo from small shops called kaḍēs, and arrived home—often from a long commute on the bus or short walk from the field—when the evening meal had long been prepared.1 Nevertheless, to live and shop the Cargill’s way tapped into the aspirations of the middle class in the town.

2 The picture of modernity conjured by the single phrase, ‘On your way home’, was not lost on my friend Saman, who I joined in an internet café as two tech-savvy young men helped him make a new design with a similar tagline for the signboard above his own business, a bakery called ‘Saman Bakers.’ Saman conscripted me to help him with his signboard project. We grasped for words that might contain the same evocative fusion of home-food and a ‘modern-lifestyle’ captured neatly by Cargill’s for his eponymous bakery, but failed. Nothing seemed to fit, and in the end ‘Saman Bakers’ was displayed sans tagline on the signboard. 3 While naming, branding and creating slogans are high-stakes matters for franchises and local businesses alike, my focus in this essay is to be found 20 minutes away from Cargill’s Dambulla branch and 15 minutes from Saman Bakers, in Sri Lanka’s largest wholesale vegetable market where similar issues of self-presentation play out. In the market, fixed above the opening of every stall, is a large colourful signboard that bears the name of the business beneath. Drawing on two years of ethnographic research, this essay examines the practice of naming small businesses in a market town in rural Sri Lanka, where I lived between 2010 and 2012 with a business family who owned a stall in the wholesale market.2 I went to the market almost every day to observe the vegetable business at the wholesale level and participate in market life. I conducted interviews and collected survey data in Sinhala. Vegetable merchants were often secretive and suspicious of outside interest in the inner workings of their businesses; introduction to the market through my host family was essential. Merchants’ interest in who I was and the importance of having someone to vouch for me, coupled with guardedness regarding their own affairs, made the public projection of their professional-selves through signboards even more intriguing. 4 The question I pursue throughout is this: why do vegetable merchants give their businesses the names they do? Of the 144 signboards above the stalls in the wholesale market, 68 use a personal name; 26 use initials as business names; 22 use words of good will such as ‘saralanka’ (prosperous Lanka) and sandasaranaya (moon-blessed place); 19 stalls use place names or names of cooperatives and associations; whilst only nine stalls use surnames. 5 Signboards and the names they bear tell stories about the past and the future, success and shame, separation and loss, violence and dissimulation. While giving a name to a small business has an axiomatic instrumental property (identity and branding) by discussing naming practices against the backdrop of a more intimate set of criteria, such as intergenerational relationships, male sociality within business families, and the production of a new family through a new family business, much more can be read from the names that decorate signboards. Names given to small businesses evince a broader set of otherwise abstract social processes: the denigration of and , as well as anxiety manifest in the disconnect between what people want and what people perceive to be expected of them. 6 Each optimistically selected business name, advertised on every carefully designed signboard, I argue, speaks to material and moral economies as well as nuanced perceptions of personhood. In this vein, the connection between the family name and

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the types of commodities these names become associated with is significant. What does it mean to connect the family name—which is expected to endure and grow—to a business that deals in short-term perishable items? A discussion of the commodity itself is consonant with Aditya Bharadwaj’s discussion of the ‘bad name’ / badnam and the ‘bad business’ (this issue). I suggest that analysing ‘good’ and ‘bad’ names alongside ‘good’ or ‘bad’ businesses takes on renewed significance in the context of the ‘family business,’ where the stakes of bad branding seem particularly high and inescapably personal. With a focus on the small town merchant in South Asia, the themes of this paper resonate with the complex issues of branding and identity discussed by William Mazzarella (this issue). In the context of the small business, I suggest that selecting the name of the small business marks a separation intimately interwoven into the life courses of business families, akin to and often coeval with the production of a conjugal home. The more sinister side of naming draws attention to the navigation of identity markers that have assumed new significance throughout the war in Sri Lanka, notably ethnicity and religion; as well as the other less frequently documented marker of identity on the island that has existed relatively uninterrupted through times of conflict, namely caste.3 7 At the heart of this paper are the stories of logics that inform decisions made by vegetable merchants to name their businesses. By taking the signboards and the names of the businesses as the point of departure, I explore the problems of attributing one’s name to a particular ‘thing,’ as well as attributing a product to a particular name. Such a discussion lends insight to the human world of the South Asian vegetable: a world in which an aubergine can leave a person morally compromised and socially stigmatised, or play a memorable role in an assassination.

Establishing the market

8 Sri Lanka’s ongoing experiment with economic liberalisation, which began in the late 1970s, more or less maps onto its three decade long civil war (officially, 1983–2009). The area most significantly impacted by the policies of the open economy (the Sinhala dominated south), and those where its effects were largely absent (the Tamil dominated north and east), mirror the contours of the conflict itself. In the centre of this landscape, situated at a crossroads in the middle of the island, is the market town of Dambulla. Although situated further south from what became the much fought-over border areas, its population swell was part of the broader swath of formal and informal migration to the northern dry zone that accompanied state-led irrigation projects instigated in the late 1960s. Farmers and merchants moved in to cultivate or simply acquire land in the newly irrigated area.4

9 The increase in population, coupled with the new availability of lorries, transport vehicles, and credit, created business opportunities for rural entrepreneurs. With the arrival of mobile phones, which allowed businessmen to stay in contact with suppliers and buyers, conditions for middle-manning became even more advantageous, in particular for those in the centre of the island who could link up with consumers and suppliers from other towns. For entrepreneurs such as the Dambulla merchants in the wholesale market, the range of commercial activity was not limited to the local market, relationships with suppliers could be established with people all over the island. Many traders moved to Dambulla and maintained connections with the farmers in the area

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they moved from; these farmers would then provide the merchants with produce, which they would sell on for commission. For the market men, the spatial imaginaries of commerce and the networks of business extended beyond immediate interactions in the market. Buyers look for sellers as sellers look for buyers, and Dambulla merchants mediate this process. It is in the context of Dambulla as a town of newcomers and unknowns that establishing a name becomes particularly significant. 10 Before Dambulla came to prominence as a vegetable-trading town, the largest market for vegetables was the Pettah market in Colombo. If vegetables did not go to Pettah they were sold in small local markets called polas.5 According to Dambulla merchants, the largest trading point for vegetables in the centre of the island was at another junction town to the north of Dambulla, called Vavuniya. When the war in the north intensified in the late 1980s, the Vavuniya market ceased to be able to operate. As markets further north began to be controlled by the LTTE (Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam) or closed down entirely, Dambulla became the trading point that could service the north and the south. By the mid-1990s Dambulla—which had already been developing as an informal vegetable trading point—was the obvious choice for a more formalised central market that could feasibly reach the entire island.6 Today, Dambulla boasts the largest wholesale vegetable market on the island, mediating the sale of over 60 per cent of the island’s vegetables.7 11 The wholesale vegetable market comprises 144 vegetable commission agent stalls, known as kaḍēs.8 Each kaḍē has a kaḍē team. Each team consists of a minimum of five people: the manager who is referred to as the mudalali (lit. money person), the accountant, the salesman, and three porters (referred to as nāthami, and occasionally as coolies).9 Each kaḍē in the market is exactly the same size as the next (approximately three meters by seven meters) and contains more or less the same equipment: a whiteboard, a set of weighing scales and a desk with a computer. Space in the kaḍē is left clear to store the vegetables in plastic woven sacks referred to as ‘gunni-bags’ or badu (things), and by some market men as simply kello (lit. the girls). 10 There is a desk for the manager (henceforth mudalali) and the accountant that in almost all kaḍēs runs parallel to the sidewall. Directly in front of the desk on the opposite side wall are two heavy-duty electric scales; the first set of scales is on the floor and weighs produce too heavy to be lifted to the second set, which is about shoulder height so porters who carry the produce in can roll it off their shoulders and on to the weighing platform. 12 The business of running a kaḍē in the wholesale market is the business of being a commission agent. Commission agents lend money to farmers for the cultivation period; recipient farmers are then obliged to sell their produce through the stall or stalls belonging to the commission agents. A commission agent’s interests lie in selling the highest volume of vegetables possible, as his commission is worked out by how much weight he can mediate the sale of through his stall. To be the biggest vegetable trader and turn over the highest volume of vegetables, a commission agent needs two things: farmers to bring stock and buyers to come and take it away. Maintaining buyers and sellers involves entering into relations of credit and debt in both directions: giving loans to farmers and advancing stock to buyers. Thus, being an adept creditor (in cash or kind) is crucial for building up one’s name in the business and maintaining steady trade through the stall. One must build the name, and the name in turn will build the business.

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The dubious morality of the (vegetable) trader

13 At a retail level, vegetables can be sold by farmers looking to diversify their income, and by the poorest of people who will lay them out on the side of the street on top of old sacks. At the wholesale level, however, selling a vegetable requires connections and capital. Despite the capital and connections required, vegetable trading remains a problematic enterprise to cultivate status through. Partly because a vegetable is not a high-end or sophisticated good, but mainly because vegetable merchants are cursed by consumers when retail prices are high and cursed by farmers when wholesale prices are low. A vegetable is a commodity of considerable concern to a great many people: those who are not producing or selling, may well be buying, and those who are neither buying nor selling them, may well be eating them. Vegetables fuse and interrelate otherwise disparate social worlds.11 The material significance of vegetables in Sri Lanka, and their resonance in the public imagination, does not make them an easy commodity to cultivate a ‘good name’ through trading. In urban centres as well as the rural outskirts, bemoaning the high cost of a vegetable is commonplace and the retail cost of vegetables is a subject of widespread concern, if not suspicion. In his ethnography of the advertising industry in Sri Lanka, Buying and Believing, Steven Kemper goes so far as to suggest that ‘most Sri Lankans have had suspicions at one time or another [of being cheated] for fruits, vegetables, rice, or any commodity that needs to be weighed’ (Kemper 2001: 188). The cost of a vegetable is not merely a discursive yardstick with which to measure the state of the national economy, but also a moral commentary on the state of society. When vegetables were overproduced, it was often attributed to youth unemployment: the idea being that because young people had nothing else to do they would cultivate some vegetables for money. Wasteful gluts, as well as shortages in supply that lead to high prices, are understood by many as connoting the government’s inability to control manipulative middlemen and harness the malevolence of the open market.

14 Selling vegetables on such a scale at the wholesale market is perhaps indicative of a transformation in agricultural production away from production for use, toward production for the market—a type of production anathema to the Sinhala nationalist conception of the idyllic peasant life, in which the rural cultivator is assumed to live a life of subsistence production organised around Buddhism, paddy fields and the tank that irrigates them (Moore 1985: 190). It is in this context that the growth of the market sits uncomfortably for influential characters such as the chief priest of the local Buddhist Temple. Animosity from the priest in Dambulla toward the work of supposedly usurious and immoral middle-men in the vegetable trade was set against the backdrop of the otherwise morally virtuous work of wet-rice paddy cultivation, a notion inspired in no small part by the colonial predilection for such orderly and visible organisation of labour (Spencer 2003: 37), and more recently, the increasing influence of merchants in local level politics (see Heslop 2014).12 15 Vegetable merchants themselves are well aware of public accounts of their business operations as exploitative and parasitic, since this view is one regularly expounded in the national press.13 That Sri Lankan vegetables travel too far from field to plate, and that producers and consumers are out of pocket because there are too many exploitative middlemen in the system, were themes that consistently emerged in interviews with economists and agro-economists. In this light the naming of a

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vegetable stall could be understood as strategic, reactionary, even defensive. Consider the upbeat and patriotic tone of stalls such as, jayalanka—victorious Lanka, jayabīma— victorious land, saralanka—prosperous Lanka, āsiri—good wishes, 14 sithumina— thoughtful, sandasarnaya—moon-blessed place, Mahajana—public, and, vimukthi— liberation. 16 So what we have with the vegetable is a fairly unappealing commodity. A thing that almost everybody has an opinion of—a vegetable doesn’t particularly allow for specialist knowledge: a carrot is by and large a carrot. It’s a commodity of relatively unexciting, vapid, and obvious utility, a material of low value which offers little by way of status for the salesman through its handling. In fact, what small profit margins there are in the vegetable business render the vendor vulnerable to accusations of manipulation and exploitation. Portrayal of the wholesale traders, collectively named middlemen (atharamediyen), as usurious, corrupting, and detrimental to the vegetable industry is a common feature in the literature on the agricultural economy in Sri Lanka (Esham & Usani 2006; De Silva, Ratnadiwakara & Soysa 2008; Perera, Kodithuwakku & Weerahewa 2004). This representation is juxtaposed to that of the seemingly virtuous cultivator and the mechanisms of the state that toil to support the agricultural industry in post-colonial Lanka. 17 The name given to the traders inside the wholesale market, mudalali, is itself indicative of the vilification of the trader. In Sinhalese the word mudalali is used to refer to a shopkeeper or a trader and is ubiquitous throughout the island. Mudalali literally means ‘money person.’ It implies ‘making a living by buying and selling’ (Weeratunge 2010: 339).15 In rural circles mudalalis were often seen as morally dubious (Southwold- Llewellyn 1994; Weeratunge 2010). This was largely based on the idea that mudalalis were often considered as ‘outsiders.’ Stereotypically, mudalalis would have been Tamils, Muslims, or low-country Sinhalese, who would have moved from ‘outside’ to a particular area, often, but certainly not exclusively, to do business. Therefore, while the name mudalali is a superficial indicator of occupation it also constitutes a set of ideas about place and belonging. 18 That merchant capitalists were commonly ‘outsiders’ to a community is part of a ‘history of otherness’ (Weeratunge 2010: 333) which it has been argued characterises the development of capitalism in Sri Lanka (Moore 1997) and elsewhere (Simmel 1990; Chirot & Reid 1997; Hart & Hann 2009). According to Hart and Hann (2009), mercantile activities have been historically restricted to excluded or minority ethnic groups. This, they claim, was a ‘ploy’ by rulers to deal with the dangers that markets presented, ‘ensuring no citizens had access to money and that those who did lacked political power,’ the most poignant example of this perhaps being ‘the pariah status of Jews in medieval Europe’ (Hann & Hart 2005: 2). Anthony Reid and Daniel Chirot describe entrepreneurial minorities as ‘essential outsiders’ (1997), and draw comparisons between the ‘creative and vulnerable roles’ of Jews in central Europe and Chinese in as, ‘“outsiders at the center” of dynamic processes of change’ (Reid 1997: 33–4). In South Asia, merchants and traders have been depicted as having an ambiguous relationship with the nation-state, they often came from different places, spoke different languages, and followed different religions; such qualities fuzzy the desired coherence of the nation-state’s image of itself (Reid 1997: 33).16 The Marwaris of India might also be added to this list of mercantile-outsiders. Within the Marwaris, as Chris Gregory points out, adherents of Jainism—a religion that ‘has its origins in anti-

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Brahmin protest’ (Gregory 1997: 166)—are the ‘undisputed mercantile elite.’ In Sri Lanka, even a name as general as that for merchant, mudalali, positions its bearer in relation to the nation-state, or in relation to the nation-state’s ideal image of itself, in a particular way. In the case of Sri Lanka this is an image largely dominated by romanticised ideals of subsistence paddy farmers, government schoolteachers, and more recently, soldiers. If the characteristics of being a morally dubious ‘outsider’ are conferred through being a merchant, in Sri Lanka it is particularly problematic when the word ‘merchant’ is prefixed by the word ‘vegetable.’

To put the vegetable trade to your name

19 In 1998, traders who had previously been selling vegetables in small shops sprawled around the crossroads in the centre of the town were moved into the stalls at the new wholesale market. Most of the stall owners had previously sold vegetables from the junction in the 1970s. By 2011, when the vegetable stalls had been operating there for some time, many of the kaḍēs were no longer managed by the original trader who founded the business at the junction, but rather by their sons or nephews. Sons and nephews, who take over the management of the stalls in their late twenties and early thirties, usually keep their father’s name as the name of the kaḍēs, or the same name as the business that operated from the junction.17 This was professed at times to be for reasons of sentiment, in honour of the father who founded the business, but more often it was claimed to be because it is their fathers—and not the sons and nephews—with whom the farmers are familiar. Many of the first generation of vegetable merchants came from farming backgrounds themselves. Keeping the name of the original founder of the business on the signboard above the door enabled the farmers to locate and patronise the stall and the trader with whom they had already established a connection. However, this was not the only strategy employed to build a recognisable brand for their business, nor was it the only logic at work in designing the advertisement boards that hang above each of the kaḍēs.

20 Many of the kaḍēs were named after the son who is expected to inherit the business. This was the case for Saman, with whom this essay began, whose first name prefixed all of the businesses owned by the family. The reason for this, as it was explained to me by his father, was simply because Saman was his only son and he expected him to take over all of the businesses. Here, names compel succession. A similar story was told by the founding fathers of ‘Thushara Traders’ and ‘Buddhika Stores’ and there are many more kaḍēs in the market named after the sons of the original owners who are expected to inherit them. 21 Significant in the use of the son’s first name rather than the family name on signboards of the market kaḍēs is that it—unlike the family name—does not indicate caste. In her ethnography of the European fur trade, Siobhan Magee (2013) asserts that the type of ‘thing’ a business trades plays a role in informing the decision to introduce the family name to the enterprise. For traders at the Copenhagen Fur Auction, family names ‘indicated who the “big players” were’ and ‘whose fur animals had the “best pedigree”’ (Magee 2013: 231). In a similar way, talk of ‘pedigree,’ heritage, family, and family names proves particularly well suited to the sale of animals and animal products, as Rebecca Cassidy demonstrates in her work on the breeding and marketing of thoroughbred race horses in Newmarket (Cassidy 2002). For well-established Allepan

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suq traders described by Annika Rabo, the family name assures a reputation among traders (Rabo 2005). According to Paul Anderson, the trading names of ‘old money’ families of the Allepo suqs that have been built up over generations are asserted as a ‘form of distinction’ in the face of ‘new’ petit bourgeois traders who have come to prominence through recent liberalisation (Anderson 2011: 42). In these markets, the family name matters. In contrast to these examples in which the family name plays a central role in trader self-presentation, within the wholesale market only nine family names are printed on the signboards of the 144 kaḍēs, whilst personal names feature on 68 signboards. A preoccupation with ‘heritage’ is seemingly less significant for vegetable merchants and there may be several reasons for this. 22 Unlike Polish fur, fine Syrian fabrics and thoroughbred race horses, luxurious items that evoke in their transactors a sense of high-quality and refinement (in product and production) over time, vegetables are quotidian items and imbue little status or heritage onto the family name of the trader. At the point of wholesale in the vegetable trade, the quality of the ‘thing’ is measured in touch, texture, and the likelihood of it surviving a bumpy journey to the next market. While some vegetables are more popular than others or thought to be more ‘up market,’ there is little space for discernment or taste that could be attributed to the family name at this point in a vegetable’s ‘social life’ (Appadurai 1986). In contrast to fur and high-quality fabric, vegetables are goods that perish relatively quickly, it may be considered inauspicious to put the family name —which is expected to endure and grow—to a business that deals in short-term perishable items. 23 Not connecting the vegetable business with the family name might be suggestive of a sense of shame associated with vegetables and the relatively low cultural status attached to the vegetable trade itself. Unflattering depictions of vegetable merchants more generally as usurious and morally dubious may similarly dis-incentivise the putting of family names to vegetable businesses. Alternatively, as the following section will explore, family names can be omitted from the vegetable trade because the family name is itself indicative of something the trader may wish to conceal or distance from the business: ‘lower’ caste status, which is also discussed in terms of ancestry and ‘pedigree,’ or perceived lack thereof (Abeyasekera 2013: 209), or some other potentially dangerous signifier of identity such as religion or ethnicity.

To put the family name to the business

24 Names as personal markers of identity have an historic basis in caste (Amarasiri 2009: 78), whilst caste has a basis in work and livelihood, or, duty and obligation to a King. In Sri Lanka, much like in India, caste is hierarchical; names indicative of caste therefore also have the potential to be hierarchical.18 Sinhala names can connote caste, the village a person is from, their occupation, religion and ancestry. At the same time, names can be changed; therefore a name can equally disguise hierarchical connotations. There is considerable resistance to open discussion of caste in Sri Lanka (Stirrat 1982, Spencer 1990; Abeyasekera 2013), as in India where caste has been described as an embarrassment for nationalist projects of 20th century modernity (Dirks 2001).19 A consistent trait among many of the middle-class business families I knew in Dambulla, was a pronounced reluctance to attribute any significance to the role of caste in their daily lives.20

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25 A complex and not entirely consistent discussion regarding Sinhala family names and their significance in the social organisation of rural life in Sri Lanka peaked in the middle of the twentieth century.21 To pick up the story on names and naming practices in 2015, without getting tangled in the details, two key points about Sinhala names need to be understood. Firstly, family names in Sri Lanka, passed down through men from one generation to the next, carry with them recognisable status markers of a caste and class nexus. Secondly, names can and often are changed. 26 One way of changing one’s name is through marriage, preferably hypergamy. Drawing on the work of Kumari Jayawardena (2007) and Michael Roberts (1997), Asha Abeyasekera notes that ‘from the early 20th century onwards marriage became a principal strategy for social mobility for both men and women within the newly formed bourgeoisie’ (Abeyasekera 2013: 102). Yalman claims that a hypergamous marriage can facilitate a domino-effect of name changes outwith the married couple and into the wider kin network whereby those who want to lay a claim—through the marriage—to the ‘higher status’ name simply just take the new name on (Yalman 1967). Another way to change one’s name is to do it officially. 27 Amarasiri De Silva (2009) analyses the various trends in name changing practices in the late 20th century using announcements of name changes in the national newspapers. The abridged version of Amarasiri’s conclusion is simply that nobody changes their name to resemble a name that is considered ‘lower’ than the one they already have.22 Those who are not the dominant goyigama caste either become goyigama or choose names that do not reveal caste at all (acaste names). Or they change their names to resemble those of the dominant caste of the area in which they live. In any case, the name they have chosen is a name that is considered either ‘higher’ status than the one they have, or a name that does not convey caste status at all. An overwhelming number, however, opt for goyigama names. Those who are goyigama and change their name tend to do so in order to move up in the hierarchy of goyigama names—normally into the radala name group, the aristocratic sub-caste of the goyigama. 28 Amarasiri’s conclusion that people generally appropriate a name considered higher status than the name they currently have, although remarkable in its detail, is not particularly new. In the 1960s Gananath Obeyesekere remarked on the wide use of patronymics among affluent families in the Kandyan provinces. The ‘usurpation’ (and pejoration) of such titles began apace during the colonial era after the ban on assuming patronymics and titles was lifted (Obeyesekere 1967: 225). Ralph Pieris, in Sinhalese Social Organisation (1956), explains that ‘Scions of a man honoured with the Patabendi (an honorific conferred by a king) title ‘Suriyasekera Mudiyanse’ would convert it into a by adding the suffix ‘lage’ (belonging to or descending from) and call themselves Suriyasekera Mudiyanselage, ‘descendants from Suriyasekera Mudiyanse’’ (Pieris 1956: 173; cf. Obeyesekere 1967: 224). In southern Sri Lanka, the Portuguese period (1505–1658) was particularly important in terms of name changing, ‘for it allowed lower castes who dared not usurp patabendi titles an opportunity to take over Portuguese “surnames”’ (Obeyesekere 1967: 225).23 Although caste cannot be transgressed—it is only superficially changed by the change in title—caste can, has, and is dissimulated and even emulated by changing one’s name. 29 The dissimulation of caste becomes significant in the context of Dambulla, as many vegetable mudalalis who have become successful, and wish to be highly regarded locally, are not from the most highly regarded caste, goyigama. However, the nine kaḍēs

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that do have family names on the signboards above the businesses either do not reveal caste at all (acaste names) or are recognisably goyigama. One in particular is from the high-status radala name group, whilst another has added to the family name on the signboard a high-status honorific not present in the family name as written in the ownership documents. For most merchants, caste was ardently dismissed as antiquated and unnecessary as a form of status distinction. Occupation and the associated resources and influence it afforded, as well as money and material assets, were thought to be much more important components of attaining high status than caste. Attaining status requires attributing value to its production within one’s lifetime through work, becoming rich, and transcending the cultural and material conditions one was born in to. This requires a ‘strategic de-linking’ (Abeyasekera 2013: 202) of prestige and status from ‘a good birth’ and resituating it in more immediate contexts. An important part of a project like this is to dissimulate caste. 30 As well as being a cursory signifier of caste, which in turn acts as a marker of place, lineage and ‘pedigree’ (Abeyasekera 2013: 290), and by extension status, surnames or family names are also explicitly indicative of race and ethnicity. This was something else that mudalalis have an interest in dissimulating or subtly playing down where possible in the market. Of the twelve stalls operated by Muslims in the market, none have recognisably Muslim names on the signboards. Muslims trade under signboards that display an , a Sinhala name, the name of a gem, or something vaguely patriotic such as ‘Lanka.’ 31 There was once a Tamil man with a license to trade from a wholesale kaḍē. Thought to be an LTTE informer, with a network of spies in the market working as wage labourers, after a bomb went off on a bus in the centre of the town in 2008 he was promptly assassinated inside his vegetable stall. Two men supposedly from a Government Special Task Force (STF) were said to have gone into the vegetable stall, inquired about the price of an aubergine, shot him dead instantly when he answered, and sped away on a motorcycle. There is perhaps no redemptive business name or carefully selected signboard tagline that could have saved the murdered trader once his assassination had been sanctioned. However, the murder of the Tamil trader illuminates the importance of names in the market place, since the potential for ‘dangerous’ people to be absorbed into the market—to work and be accommodated unregistered, unknown and unnamed —subsequently developed into an acute matter of concern for the traders and the market authorities alike. A system of registration for all informal labourers was promptly implemented and nobody could henceforth work in the market without registering their name on their National Identity Card (NIC). This programme of making labourers visible through their names spoke to fears about front-line deserters from the Government forces, as well as Tamil Tiger cadres, concealing themselves within the market.24 32 With the exception of the assassinated Tamil stall owner and a handful of Muslims, all the kaḍē owners are Sinhala. None of the kaḍēs owned by Muslims use their names on the signboards, many keep the Sinhala name of the original owner of the stall, or an initial, like ‘C. S Stores’ and ‘S. L. Stores.’ Two Muslim-owned stalls that have been renamed are called ‘Ruby Traders’ and ‘Lanka Stores.’ Muslim traders mainly deal with import items such as potatoes and onions, but some deal with dried fish products that come from the east coast. Dealing with products such as dried fish, although officially permissible in the perishables market, angered many Sinhala traders who thought it

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inappropriate. In 2012, the Dambulla mosque, attended by Muslim market traders, was attacked by a group of protestors roused by the chief priest of the Dambulla Temple. The attack stood out as a significant event against the backdrop of island-wide anti- Muslim sentiment from Buddhists in Sri Lanka that has intensified since the end of the war (Heslop 2014: 21). It is in this context that the names of Muslim market stalls might need to be disguised. Although entirely possible to find out which kaḍēs in the market are run by Muslims, to exclude a Muslim name from the signboard and trade under an acronym, a Sinhala name, or something vaguely patriotic like ‘Lanka,’ reflects a kind of subtle yet significant everyday-type gesture of minority politics learned over decades of ethnically and racially driven conflict (Hannifa 2007; Thiranagama 2012).

In your own name

33 At one level, what names and family names on signboards reveal can be understood in terms of caste, ethnicity, and religion, but an interpretation closer to home could see signboards reflect the aspirations and ambitions between generations of trading families. A more intimate reading of the decisions that inform the naming practices of a business draws attention to the complex relationships between fathers and sons, in particular between influential land owning fathers and sons living in patrilocal conjugal residence. Scholarship on male intergenerational relations in rural Sri Lanka points out that a man who remains in his natal village after marrying a woman from a distant village cannot easily cultivate the fields belonging to his father in-law and is thus dependent on his own father for land to work (Tambiah 1965, see also Yalman 1967). Therefore, sons who remain in their parental home remain under the rule of their fathers. Saman is one such verilocal son, heir to several enterprises and destined to work under the watchful eye of his father.

34 Saman is a popular name in Dambulla. It is the name of a famous deity in the Buddhist who guards Sri Pāda, a pilgrimage site on top of Samanalaya Mountain (butterfly mountain), where Sinhala Buddhists maintain there exists a footprint made by Lord Buddha ‘during his third mythical visit to the island’ (Premakumara De Silva 2013: 159).25 Saman also means ‘the rising morning sun,’ a name particularly apposite for a bakery that opens early and faces due east. Saman’s name was written on the signboards that hung above the various enterprises owned by his father: ‘Saman Bakers,’ ‘Saman Traders,’ ‘Saman Stores,’ and ‘Saman Mill.’ The only business that did not bear his name was the sari shop started by his sister. Despite the fact that his name prefixed almost all of the family businesses, Saman will not be the sole beneficiary of the businesses. Saman will inherit the parental home (maha gedara), but will receive only one third of the businesses and land. Saman’s two sisters will inherit the remaining two thirds of their father’s business assets. Patrilineal succession in Sri Lanka is undermined by a system of bilateral inheritance, in which all siblings have equal rights to their parents’ legacy; thus Saman’s hold on the family businesses existed only superficially on the signboard itself. 35 Before taking over the vegetable stall and becoming a commission agent Saman had to work every day in the family bake house with his brothers-in-law. Although from a merchant family and not interested in farming paddy fields, Saman is similarly dependent on his father for land, work, capital and connections. Despite the fact his father named almost all of his businesses after him, Saman knew that his two sisters

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would equally inherit the business assets. The matter of equal inheritance with his sisters, despite the businesses being ‘in his name,’ was not an issue for Saman; the frustrations he felt stemmed from having to work under his controlling father and alongside his sister’s husbands. 36 A critical reading of the power discourses behind a name, such as Susan Benson’s discussion on injurious names and the strictures imposed by names in the context of slavery (2006), draws attention to the potentially significant omission of a possessive apostrophe; it is ‘Saman Bakery’ and ‘Saman Mill,’ and not ‘Saman’s Bakery’ or ‘Saman’s Mill.’26 Saman’s father, as the giver of the name to the business, has control over the business that bears the name Saman. In a similar vein, Saman’s father also named his son Saman and exercises control over him. In particular, over his son’s access to the business that bears his name; the business through which Saman can, in a sense, build or take ownership of his own name. Benson’s assertion that ‘names are never simply our own: they are conferred on us’ (Benson 206: 179) and that, ‘We are named by others and, in many naming systems, for others: in a critical sense, then, names belong as much, if not more, to the givers of names as to those that bear them’ (Benson 2006: 180) accords strikingly with my own interpretation of Saman’s relationship with his father. Here, his personal name is not only under the control of his father, but is overshadowed by the incorporation of wider family.27 37 The omission of the family name takes on a new significance when analysing Saman’s signboard from the perspective of a young man attempting to disconnect himself (where beneficial) from the family he was born into, when trying to become successful in the world of work. At the bake house his father owned, the sense of independence, ownership and separation from his parental family that may otherwise have come with the business name ‘Saman Bakers’ was undermined by the fact he had to work under his father’s supervision and with his brother-in-laws. The bake house was a family business associated with wider kin—in-laws, lineage, and the family he was born into— whereas the vegetable kaḍē represented a break in the lineage, and Saman’s role as head of ‘his’ business and provider for his own nuclear family. Although it was his father who named the various businesses using Saman’s first name, it should not distract from how important it is for Saman to work under his own name in the market, as opposed to his family name; or, in the market on his own as opposed to in the bake house with his sisters’ husbands. 38 A trader such as Saman, who would otherwise draw on the social capital that belonging to a known family permits, would not be able to hide his family name from anyone— regardless of what he called his kaḍē. Nevertheless, there is a propensity for new businessmen to name their kaḍēs in homage to their new families and not their old ones. While the bake house is more evocative of a typical ‘family business,’ the vegetable kaḍē is an asset of a business family: normally an asset that is destined for a son, and often a wayward son, as a means for him to break away from the family he was born into and provide for the one he is the head of. 39 Despite the trajectory of the business down the male line, there are no stalls in the market which postfix the family name with, ‘…and Sons,’ a formula which has been adopted by other businesses in Sri Lanka such as Jinadasa and Sons, Samuel and Sons, and most famously, Perera and Sons. Since the vegetable market is a predominantly male dominated space, one might expect the names of the stalls to reflect a desire for male succession.28 Surprisingly however, many of the market kaḍēs are named after the

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traders’ wives, daughters and nieces. Naming the kaḍē after wives and daughters is not about expressing intent for succession, or to build the name of the daughter as a known person in the town, but rather a form of mapping business providence onto other types of success in more intimate and domestic spheres of life such as marriage and childbirth. Rupasinha, the owner of a kaḍē called ‘Sudu Nadi Traders,’ told me how ‘Sudu Nadi’ was a combination of the names of his wife, his son, and his daughter. Standing under the signboard of his vegetable store one evening, Rupasinha explained that: 40 If you have a child it is lucky for your businesses. Horoscopes will tell you if a child is good for business. If the child is good for business then it is fortunate if you name your business after the child.

Figure 1 : Rupasinha’s store

‘Sudu Nadi Traders’

41 I went to meet Rupasinha having been told that he had a particularly striking success story. Rupasinha is now a wealthy businessman who, as well as owning the vegetable business in the market, owns a restaurant in the town and a successful real-estate business. Rupasinha’s pre-marital poverty formed the backdrop for his narrative. In the 1970s, he explained, he was a wage labourer and drove a tractor for a landowner near Kegalle for Rs.30 per day. After he married, his fortune (suddenly) changed. He moved to Dambulla to start selling other people’s vegetables for a commission and subsequently earned himself a stall in the wholesale market in the late 1990s, where his fortune further developed. Uplifting as Rupasinha’s success story was, it was not particularly novel. Many of the people from rural areas around Dambulla who became traders in the 1970s to mid-1980s had a similar ‘rags-to-riches’ story to tell. Ratna Mudalali, the president of the influential Market Traders’ Union, and incidentally one of the richest men in Dambulla, delighted in telling me that when he came to Dambulla he did not even have ten rupees in his pocket and came to work selling lottery tickets by a small shack to people travelling through. When I moved to Dambulla at the beginning of 2011, Ratna Mudalali was the most powerful trader in the market and his son was a candidate in the mayoral election.

42 In Dambulla, ‘origin stories’ (Yanagisako 2002) do not run particularly deep. Young merchants like Saman and his friends were born in Dambulla, and their fathers had already established businesses and acquired land in the town. It was generally the case that their fathers were the founders and expectations to continue the businesses were on them. In Saman’s case it was his grandparents that moved to Dambulla. Moreover, it was his grandmother (father’s mother) who obtained valuable pieces of land in and

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around the town through a connection with the local monk. His grandfather died when his father was young and it was up to Saman’s father to develop the businesses on the land. Saman’s origin story, and the worries his father had about him taking ownership, fit the adage that recurred through Yangisako’s fieldwork among silk industry capitalists: ‘The Grandfather founded (the firm), the sons develop it, and the grandsons destroy it’ (Yanagisako 2002: 175). Among Dambulla vegetable traders more generally however, origin success stories and anxieties about the destruction of the business were for the most part contained within two generations. Parents often told me how they were building something that their children would most likely throw away. Few kaḍēs had pictures of the fathers who founded the business on the wall, since pictures of parents are usually displayed after death and many of the original owners were still alive.29 43 The only picture that consistently featured on the walls of the kaḍēs, that wasn’t of a deity, was of the local minister, Janaka Bandara Tennekoon. His picture was displayed in every stall, as he was the man who issued the licenses to trade from them. In the picture, his image was pasted into the centre of the frame against a white background that gave the impression that he was floating like a deity. This god-like image of the minister served as a good reminder of his ultimate ownership and the name that really mattered in the context of the market. 44 ‘Ramya Traders’ is owned by a merchant known fondly as Podi Māma (small uncle). Podi Māma has the worn and weathered look of a farmer-cum-trader, or worker-cum- owner, and does business in a loose fitting shirt and sarong, his chunky and rough digits garnished with an enormous sovereign ring. Podi Māma’s appearance fits the iconic image of the rural merchant conjured in the stereotypes espoused by my friends in the capital. It was not just the Colombo middle class quick to categorise Dambulla merchants as distinctly ‘new-money’; the traders themselves were aware that Dambulla is a town where people have ‘got rich quick.’ Recognition that people’s social, cultural and economic possibilities had broadened somewhat rapidly was conveyed through the local idiom, kathusagē kara ratrang benda wagē (lit. like a lizard wearing a gold chain), a phrase that was used to suggest that somebody was presenting an image of themselves that did not fit who they ‘really’ were. 45 Podi māma’s elder brother owns two of the largest and most popular clothes shops in the town, both named Ramya Textiles, which are named after his daughter, Ramya. Podi Māma was the first to obtain the market stall and decided to name it after his elder brother’s daughter since the name was already an established brand name in the town (apparently for thirty or so years). When his elder brother also got a kaḍē in the market, next door to Ramya Traders, he had to choose a different name. The elder brother’s stall, which he named Jayanthi Traders is run by his son Chaminda. ‘Jayanthi,’ another woman’s name, was chosen because the first letter (‘Ja’) had been deemed by an astrologer to be a letter that would bring prosperity to the business. Podi Māma’s brother, like many other traders, chose to make the ‘lucky name’ of the store the name of a woman.

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Figure 2: The sign for Ramya Traders

The sign reads: Ramya Vegetable Trader: little elder brother. ‘Commission trader’

Figure 3: The sign for ‘Jayanthi Stores’

46 ‘Lucky names’ (wāsanāwa nama) are lucky because the initial letter has been deemed to be so by an astrologer. In some instances a monk will give the lucky letter. In other cases the kaḍēs are named after children who, by virtue of their birth, are thought to bring good fortune to the business. The children will also have been given their names following the advice of an astrologer. It is not unusual for merchants to be told by astrologers specifically whether or not a particular child will be good for business. If they are not, then it is unlikely that their name will make it on to the billboard of the business. Wickrama and Hansani Traders, combines the ‘lucky name’ of the daughter (Hansani), and the known name of the father (Wickrama), with whom the farmers who sell their produce through the store are familiar. Wickrama’s son did not make it onto the signboard as it was deemed that his name was not as ‘lucky’ as the daughter’s. Male names that are chosen from an auspicious letter may not have anything to do with a male relative connected to the founder at all; Vimukthi (lit. liberation) and Laxman— which presumably connects directly to Laxmi, the goddess of wealth—are popular male names considered to be ‘lucky’ by the merchants.30

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On your way home

47 Beginning with Saman’s admiration of the local branch of the national supermarket franchise Cargill’s, who, with a cunningly deployed slogan on a signboard proved effective ‘middlemen to the national imagination’ by marketing an intelligible—if impracticable—vision of modern consumption (Kemper 2001: 6 cf. Mazzarella 2003) this essay moved to examine the imaginative signboards of the nation’s middlemen. In the simplest terms, the names on the kaḍē signboards are about being known. They are not advertisements in the sense that they might attract new customers. They are a means through which mudalalis portray themselves—for the most part—to one another. Whilst businesses in Sri Lanka are often named after people, this essay has explored the stories and logics behind why particular businesses are given personal names rather than surnames. In the context of the vegetable market I explored the implications of connecting ones family name to the ill-reputed vegetable trade, and, conversely, the implications of attaching the ‘wrong’ kind of name to a business at all.

48 At one level I examined why merchants map family names onto business in some instances and not others. Of further interest however, was which family it was that made it onto the business signboard. In the case of Saman, the business name was entwined in a struggle with his father and in-laws over the management of a business that was in his name. Invariably, in the market it was the names connected with the ‘new family,’ as in the wife, son or daughter of a conjugal pair, and not the ‘old family’ as evoked through alliance and descent and encapsulated through the use of the family surname, that would feature on the signboard. As we saw with Rupasinghe and Saman, and as was the case for many vegetable mudalalis, selecting the name of the small business marks a separation intimately interwoven into the life courses of business families, often even coeval with the production of a conjugal home. A discussion of names that compel succession and influence futures has led to a discussion of ‘origin stories.’ Behind the stories of names and origins is a lesser discussed aspect of traders’ lives: that they selectively view their family members as instrumental in their changing fortunes and map life events such as marriage and childbirth on to the success of their business ventures.

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NOTES

1. I use the English plural marker ‘s’ to pluralise some Sinhala words rather than directly transliterate these from the Sinhala plural forms, e.g. ‘Pola’ becomes ‘Polas’ ‘kaḍē becomes ‘kaḍēs and ‘mudalali’ becomes ‘mudalalis.’ 2. The research was funded by The Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC). 3. A notable exception was the attempt made by the LTTE to ‘ban caste’ in the areas they controlled throughout the war (see Thiranagama 2011), and the involvement of ‘lower caste’ young men in the southern insurgencies of 1971 and 1989 (Hughes 2013; Silva, Thanges and Sivapragasam 2009). 4. Those who moved into the newly-irrigated areas—predominantly Sinhala Buddhist men—were encouraged to do so as part of a broader ethno-nationalist project that framed the state-led resettlement projects in terms of resettling an ancient Sinhala kingdom that thrived in the Dry

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Zone a millennium ago (Moore 1985). This narrative was said to have been built upon a mythologised history created by nineteenth century Sinhalese elites (Peebles 1990: 31) who traced the ancestry to North Indian settlers of ‘Aryan’ stock (Obeyesekere 1975; cf. Peebles 1990: 31). 5. For more on Sri Lankan polas and periodic markets, see Deborah Winslow’s excellent work (Winslow 1977). 6. The Dambulla Dedicated Economic Centre is the largest market of its kind and reportedly receives around 26,500 metric tons of vegetables per week, approximately 3.7 million kilograms per day. It is also the most centrally located to service the island’s vegetable needs and for many years was the only market of its kind. Up to 1200 lorries can go through the DDEC in one day (De Silva, Ratnadiwakara & Soysa 2008: 4). 7. http://www.trade.gov.lk/web/ [accessed 20 April 2014] 8. The term kaḍē is used as shorthand for any kind of shop. 9. Occasionally porters will refer to themselves as nathāmi, but this and the term ‘coolie’, or in Sinhala’ kuli väda, which means wage labourer, held derogatory connotations. I will use the English word porter throughout. 10. ‘Badu’ being referred to as ‘kello’ in the market is an inversion of the way ‘kello’ are derogatorily referred to as ‘badu’ outside of the market. 11. In much the same way Wim Van Daele has discussed the preparation of food, and in particular the use of coconuts in Sri Lanka (Van Daele 2013). 12. Campaigns for rural regeneration documented by Moore in the mid-1980s encapsulated this with the slogan, wewa, chaithiya, yaya’—‘(irrigation) tank, temple, paddy field’ (Moore 1985: 190). 13. Whilst mudalalis are commonly castigated in the national press, in Dambulla feelings towards mudalalis can be ambivalent. Successful mudalalis were also secretly and openly admired. 14. Obeyesekere (1981: 203) translates āsiri from Sanskrit as, ‘the fulfillment of a benediction.’ 15. Carter’s Dictionary (1924: 503) interprets mudalali as ‘capitalist, proprietor, chief man’ (see also Southwold-Llewellyn 1994: 196). 16. Also see Jonathan Spencer (2003). 17. See Christopher Pinney, who has also documented this to be the case in photography businesses in small towns in India (Pinney 2013). 18. Unlike in India however, it is not understood in terms of blood or considered in terms of purity and pollution. 19. Caste has not been a census category since 1871 (Silva, Thanges & Sivapragasam 2009: 1) 20. When the Dambulla Temple began to undertake its own ordinations it somewhat controversially initiated a policy of non-caste based ordinations (Abeysekera 2002: 174). 21. These discussions coalesced around themes such as Ge names, glossed as a ‘house name’ that refers more specifically to what Tambiah refers to as a ‘corporate family group’ (Tambiah 1965), a married couple living outside the parental home; patabendi patronymics, a type of honorific supposedly conferred by a king (Pieris 1956: 173); and Vasagama honorifics, a prefix to a name, which according to Obeyesekere (1967) creates a surname that denotes where somebody is from and their sub-caste. For readers with the inclination I suggest these names, Edmund Leach (1960, 1961), Nur Yalman (1960, 1962, 1967), S.J. Tambiah (1964, 1968), Gananath Obeyesekere (1967). 22. Goyigama is generally considered to be the highest status caste group in the Sinhala caste system. Goyigama is also the majority caste in Sri Lanka. Goyigama is generally thought of as a caste of cultivators, however, not all who cultivate in Sri Lanka are goyigama, nor do all goyigama necessarily cultivate 23. Obeyesekere claims here that the names, Perera, De Silva, De Mel and Salgado were most popular among Karawe and Salägama castes (Obeyesekere 1967; cf. Roberts 1982). Salägama, a caste commonly associated with cinnamon peeling. Karawe, a caste typically associated with fishing (see Alexander 1979).

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24. I was told that, fearing the vegetable market might become a target, the Traders Union made an unsuccessful request to have all lorries checked for bombs as they entered the market. 25. Tamil Hindus claim it is the footprint of Lord Siva (Sivan-oli-padam). On the contrary, Muslims and Christians maintain that it belongs to Adam (Baba Adamalei). Premakumara De Silva argues that the site has been, ‘reordered into an ethnic majoritarian Buddhist space in the context of the rise of Sinhala Buddhist nationalism in post-colonial Sri Lanka’ (Premakumara De Silva 2013: 159). 26. However, this is more than likely a matter of broken English. 27. In addition to the element of control, naming the store ‘Saman’ is simultaneously a mark of his father’s sentiment and affection. 28. It is not merely a general expectation that men should be involved in the vegetable business, the licenses to run vegetables stalls in the DDEC are passed on to the sons of the owners. While sons and daughters ordinarily have equal rights when it comes to inheriting their father’s assets (bilateral inheritance) it is patrilineal succession that is written in to the legal management of the kaḍēs themselves; if the owner is not present in the kaḍē then, officially, the only person who can take his place is his son. 29. One trader, Jayatissa, died during my fieldwork and when his son took over the vegetable stall he put a big picture of his father on the wall behind the desk. 30. People called Laxman are often given the nickname ‘Lucky.’

ABSTRACTS

This paper concerns the naming of stalls in Sri Lanka’s largest wholesale vegetable market. Each optimistically selected business name, advertised on every carefully designed signboard, I argue, speaks to material and moral economies as well as nuanced perceptions of personhood. Signboards and the names they bear tell stories about the past and the future, success and shame, separation and loss, violence and dissimulation. In the context of the small business, I suggest selecting the name of the small business marks a separation intimately interwoven into the life courses of business families. The more sinister side of naming draws attention to the navigation of identity markers that have assumed new significance throughout the war in Sri Lanka, notably ethnicity and religion; as well as other less frequently documented markers of identity on the island that have existed relatively uninterrupted through times of conflict, namely caste.

INDEX

Keywords: Sri Lanka, merchants, signboards, vegetables, kinship

AUTHOR

LUKE ALEXANDER HESLOP

Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Social Anthropology, University of Edinburgh

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Badnam Science? The Spectre of the ‘Bad’ Name and the Politics of Stem Cell Science in India

Aditya Bharadwaj

AUTHOR'S NOTE

The data in this article is drawn from a larger research project supported by the European Research Council (ERC), Grant Number 313769. I am grateful to the special- issue’s editors, Veena Das and Jacob Copeman, for their truly helpful and inspiring comments. I also thank the three anonymous referees for their careful reading and comments. ‘A rose by any other name would smell as sweet’ (William Shakespeare) 1 Badnam is a demolished name. Badnami is the soiled remnants, debris, of a name pulled down. Names can implode with projectile ferocity, decimating immediate surroundings and reverberating much further. The debris or detached broken remnants of a once ‘solid name’ can possess the shrapnel-like intensity that revolves around a spoiled name. However, proximity to the shards of an imploded name can be an opportunity as well as a danger. We can say that the powerful gravitational force of an annihilated name can pull within its ambit proximate and distant names and reputations, with unpredictable consequences.

2 Names and naming, by their very nature, consecrate through a process of inscription and encryption. The good and bad potential in a name is not always manifest. In this sense, giving someone a name becomes an empty gift because the name is inherently empty to the recipient but nevertheless imbued with an uncanny potential to engender, penetrate, and define the entity so named. A good name is vulnerable, and a bad name has nothing to lose except the hope to remake it. We can argue that, strictly speaking, bad+name (badnam) is not the loss of a name but rather an act of renaming or

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at the very least the truncating of the signified. Derrida (1986) argues a name ‘appropriates itself violently, harpoons, arraigns [arraisonne] what it seems to engender, penetrates, and paralyzes with one stroke [coup] the recipient thus consecrated’ (Derrida in Ionescu 2011: 59). But in so doing what does the name mask, or what aspects of a named entity escape naming? An entity named is an entity (re)animated. This has consequences both short and long term. And whilst a ‘bad’ name seemingly has ‘bad’ implications in the short run, badnam or badnami can serve as a detour to a ‘good’ name (or reclaiming a once-good name, which through the very act of reclamation stands transformed). I am neither arguing for nor interested in seeing this as a process of resurrection: after all, badnami or bad publicity can have very final, fatal consequences for certain names, and these are eventually forgotten, lost in time, or renamed and celebrated (a point to which I will return). Drawing on French thinker Jacques Derrida’s philosophical oeuvre this article argues that badnami does not necessarily sound the of a name; instead, the inherent vulnerability of a name makes difficult the task of predicting its social trajectory and sketching routes and detours through which a name (re)establishes a ‘safe’ social presence, a ‘safe’ social career. We can argue that this is because a name tries to represent the unnameable aspect beyond the name itself. The article shows how a ‘good name’ is a vulnerable, slipping mask concealing a potential ‘bad name’ for unnameable entities named ‘science’ and ‘stem cells.’ The movement from good to bad, from clean to soiled, from famous to infamous (badnam), reveals something crucial about the very act of (re)naming. This movement does not so much rename good as bad or bad as good as if a complete transition from one to the other is ever possible. Rather, renaming occurs when shards of imploded good names and bad names come together to consolidate a new name. This coming together conceals the symbiotic and semiotic co-production of good and bad names. Good and bad names, in other words, are admixtures from deep within the unnameable aspect of an entity struggling to manifest a new named aspect (i.e., pure good and bad entities do not exist), and very often it is this mélange that slipping masks reveal. 3 The article opens by explicating the theoretical and conceptual underpinning and proceeds to inspect the political anatomy of stem cells in India. A note on the ethnographic context and the research process is preceded by some empirical observations. With the burgeoning stem cell technologies in India as its empirical backdrop, the article focuses on a particular case of a stem cell facility in India offering human embryonic stem cell therapies as a site to explore the politics underscoring naming and name-calling in this promising but equally contentious scientific domain. In the final analysis I am not seeking to generalize or draw conclusions for Indian stem cell terrain as a whole; rather, I am utilizing a particular case to show how bad name reputational fears are understood in the mundane intricacies of the everyday.

Badnami: save the name, except the name

4 In his seminal essay, ‘Sauf le nom,’ Derrida meditates on the possibility of ‘sur-naming,’ supplemental naming, which takes the place of the name. Unlike a family name in English, surnom, sur-name in French, signifies a nickname. Ironically, a surname, family name, in a certain sense merely sur-names, ‘nicknames,’ a proper name found to be incomplete, lacking, via a heritable surname (see Dutoit 1995). Sur-name for Derrida names the unnameable because what is sur-named recedes, making the sur-name more

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than the name itself, and comes in the place of the name and thus on occasions even replaces, substituting the name. Thomas Dutoit (1995) reminds us there is no adequate translation of ‘Sauf le nom.’ The closest meaning in English would read ‘except the name.’ The literary ‘save’ as synonymous with ‘except’ allows ‘save the name’ to be read as doubly articulate: as ‘except’ the name and to literally ‘save’ the name, the latter finding rare and discreet mention in the text. However, the foregoing allows us to ask if sur-naming is ‘except’ the name, whether sur-naming exception literally ‘saves’ the name being sur-named. More important, for the purposes of the argument here, it is worthwhile to explore whether bad+name comes to sur-name a name and in the very act establishes a new presence ‘except’ the name, excluding the name. If so, perhaps it is possible to imagine the receding, effacing, replaced name as ‘saved’ by the bad+sur+name. The (presumably good) name being sur-named as ‘bad’ then makes the task of (re)establishing the original name rather difficult and unnameable. As Derrida puts it, ‘As if it was necessary both to save the name and to save everything except the name…as if it was necessary to lose the name in order to save what bears the name…’ (1995: 58). A name names that which is beyond the name, the transcending truth that is other than the name. In this respect the name is always lacking, and this lack, ‘except (save) the name,’ makes naming a necessary exercise. The diversity of names, new names, old names, pseudonyms, and multiple (sur-)names circulate in a constellation that typifies neither the name nor what is named but rather beyond, in a realm where the consecrated entity remains unnameable or in a state where it is much more, [‘save/ except’] the name. A ‘bad sur-name’ is then ‘except’ (save) the unnameable that is not necessarily its opposite, ‘good,’ but rather an unnameable, unknowable, unutterable entity that is ‘saved’ because it cannot be named—an entity that can resurface to truncate the sur-name, replacing as well as effacing the name and what it signifies. In this sense Derrida could be understood as suggesting that ‘the name hidden in its potency possesses a power of manifestation and occultation, of revelation and encrypting. What does it hide? Precisely the abyss that is enclosed within it. To open a name is to find in it not something but rather something like an abyss, the abyss as the thing in itself’ (2002: 213). A sur-name is the name inscribed over a bottomless abyss, a name shaped by what it seeks to cover, hide, represent, and utter. Name can be lacking because name fails to capture the essence of that which it names, which in the final analysis remains unnameable and possessing abyss-like depth.

5 In India, badnami is not just opprobrium or defamation, but also a badge of honour, at least in certain contexts. In this respect we can begin to piece together how the loss of a name, its sur-naming, can be a generative process and the starting point of renaming a set of practices that stabilize as ‘good.’ The valorisation of badnami or its willing embrace (e.g., to embrace badnami or ignominy in love) is one such arena where loss helps gain a reputation of another kind that is transient and always tantalizingly close to accomplishing normative stability. 6 A name, good or bad, becomes a mask that is difficult to detach from the person/entity to whom it is attached. Following Derrida, the name, not the ‘unnameable’ person or entity, becomes fused with the person or entity and seizes control of the person/entity with an important caveat: the context and everyday contingency can potentially mutate to conjure the signified to mean different things. That is, from deep within the ‘abyss’ the unnameable can uncannily manifest and conjure a new sign. In this respect, badnami simultaneously can be a cause of shame and social opprobrium as well as an

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understandable momentary affliction. Lyrics of an immensely popular Bollywood song, ‘Munni badnam hui darling tere liye’ (Munni goes infamous [loses her reputation/name] for you o darling), are an unlikely but helpful lesson in understanding the badnami’s anatomy. What we learn from Munni’s predicament is that badnami is a public event with very public consequences. From Mira Bai (mystic poet circa 1498–1546) to Devdas (character from 1917 Bengali novel by Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay) to ignominious Munni, we see a long and impressive genealogy of , fictional and real, embracing amorous badnami. Paradoxically, bad+name in these examples asserts itself as both tolerable and deplorable. For example, Munni’s situation obliquely references an invisible, untarnished name slipping and soiling that is public on account of her amorous attachment to a nameless (but sur-named) ‘darling.’ The temporality implicit in the name’s vulnerable social circulation conceals a movement from the private realm to the public, from invisible to visible, and from implicit to explicit. The consequences, whilst gendered, reveal the moral texture of a name that easily frays and disintegrates explicitly, visibly, and publicly. The mask does not so much detach from the face but rather slips, revealing in a moment of collective public gasp the frail contours of a nameless face acquiring a new (bad sur-)name, a new mask. It is in the precise moment of grappling with the mask one discovers the fragility of a name—the public disrobing and equally public enrobing of a name gesture at the possibility of recovering one’s original name, mask, robe. But at the same time, the collective gasp echoes a fearful reminder that any name can slip and soil, becoming something other than what it signifies. Above all, an uncanny, lurking awareness takes hold, hinting and haunting from the unnameable, unknowable depths concealed by a name, the possibility of a new nameable aspect emerging. 7 The foregoing is a cryptic conceptual plotline of events seemingly a world away from the badnam streets invaded by ‘unsupervised,’ rebellious women like Mira and Munni and the occasional ‘failed man,’ Devdas. This is a story of the burgeoning and high- stakes field of stem cell science in India where a lone stakeholder clinician can be fighting to rescue his or her reputation for fear of badnami and ignominy (to invoke one possible meaning) in the face of regulation—commonly acknowledged as lax—and the rapidly deepening reputation of the field as a global site populated in equal measure by mavericks and mavens.

Bad+name science: political anatomy of cells

8 In her ground-breaking book Good Science: The Ethical Choreography of Stem Cell Research (2013), Charis Thompson describes the politics underscoring Proposition 71 and the California Stem Cell Research and Cures Act. Briefly, this proposition was enacted by California voters in 2004 to support stem cell research, most notably, embryonic stem cell research, in the state. The California Institute for Regenerative Medicine (CIRM) is a state agency brought into existence by Proposition 71. Funded by state-bond funds and backed by taxpayers for three billion over ten years and at a time when public libraries and schools across California were facing closure, the CIRM became a unique holding space for hype/hope, promise/despair, risk/reward, and intractable diseases/ promissory cures.

9 However, the promissory value of the CIRM and its ‘good name’ took a big hit when local media began running stories highlighting its ‘insular’ and ‘insider-like’ way of

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doing business (Hiltzik 2014). The main area of contention was the CIRM’s former president, Alan Trounson, who accepted a position on the board of directors of one of its highest-profile grantees, Stem Cells, Inc., on 7 July 2014, seven days after leaving the CIRM (Hiltzik 2014). The CIRM promised to look into the relationship between its former director and a high-profile grantee. Los Angeles Times reporter Michael Hiltzik wrote: A well-connected company with questionable finances and a research proposal of uncertain scientific validity has received favorable treatment from the CIRM. An investigation of the relationship between the firm and the CIRM’s management was placed in the hands of a law firm inextricably entwined with management and given an inappropriately narrow scope. The unanswered question burning a hole through the CIRM’s credibility is whether Stem Cells, Inc. got its money because its research was promising or because it knew the right people. For most of its existence, the CIRM has been deeply hostile to outside scrutiny. The harvest is now coming in. 10 It seems the ‘good name’ of ‘good science’ is in tatters. The once ‘solid name’ and reputation of the CIRM and its director exploded with a shrapnel-like intensity around an emerging ‘bad name.’ The unfolding scandal exposes the vulnerable underbelly of ‘good name/good science.’ It offers a fleeting glimpse at what ensues when science fails to entwine ethics as per the norms of established choreography. This case shows not that robust scientific scrutiny is unforgiving and scrupulously ethical but rather that the quality of communication and circulation within a local environment can rapidly precipitate a prefix switch and alter the very environment in which good and bad names gestate (Bharadwaj 2014). This case also offers a peek into the unnameable manifesting from behind a seemingly good and/or bad name. We can say a name not only remains vulnerable, but also conceals an unspecified aspect that bodes forth demanding a new (sur-)name. The paradox at the heart of this scandal is that it embodies all the reputational fears bad science in global locales like India is believed to inflict on good science.

11 The emergence of stem cells in India has long been in the making. I have analysed the long genealogy of developments leading up to the birth of cellular politics in India elsewhere (Bhardwaj and Galsner 2009). Here I wish to outline ways in which state actors and private stakeholders—most notably, scientists, clinicians, journalists, and academics—make claims for regulation, relevance, and resolution. In so doing I wish to sketch out in broad strokes how commentaries on what I am calling the political anatomy of stem cells in India mirror politics of naming and name-calling within this burgeoning scientific terrain. 12 A great deal of policy-setting, journalistic, and academic ink is currently flowing on the issue of stem cell technologies in India. The stated objective of the Department of Biotechnology (DBT), as per the eleventh five-year plan of the Indian government (2007–2012), was to make India globally competitive by converting the country’s diverse biological resources into useable products supported by a strong bio-industry base with an enhanced capability for market diffusion. The same goal is reinforced in the twelfth five-year plan (2012–2017). As early as 2005, India’s union minister for science and technology proclaimed the government’s intention to strengthen stem cell research in the country and support companies that followed the Good Manufacturing Practices (GMPs) per international guidelines; in this way, their products could be marketed globally (Bharadwaj 2009).

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13 The Indian stem cell landscape is seen as an uneven terrain where a range of maverick and unethical activities dovetail scientific strides in a consensible direction. In the most recent iteration of the National Guidelines for Stem Cell Research (2013), issued by the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) and the DBT, stem cells are described as not being part of standard care, and therefore no guidelines for therapy can be issued until efficacy is proven. Under the new dispensation no stem cell therapies can be offered to the patients except hematopoietic stem cells that are treated as a proven therapy. Stem cells can only be used in clinical trials after due approval from the Drug Controller General of India (DCGI). In tandem the DCGI is to modify Rule 21 of the Drugs and Cosmetics Act to include ‘stem cell and cell-based products’ as new drugs (DCGI 2013). This means clinical trials involving stem cells will require a license from the DCGI. The moves are seen as protecting the name of a promising and burgeoning field of stem cells from mavericks and unscrupulous practitioners tarnishing the image of stem cell science in India. However, these new developments are also being seen as a major hurdle in the way of medical tourism due to proposed regulatory barriers and bad name reputational fears (Jayaraman 2014). 14 The effort to cleanse India’s reputation globally has received further fillip ever since Mr. Modi’s landmark victory in the Indian general elections in May 2014. The professed aim of Mr. Modi, widely (and wildly) circulated in the media, is to turn India from a ‘scam state to skill state.’ The renaming (and rebranding) of India is indeed ironic given that the newly elected prime minister has struggled to cleanse his own bad name and past, as he is commonly held accountable by this opponents for the brutal religious violence that ripped through Gujarat state in India in 2002, when he was chief minister. However, by renaming India as a good, honest place to do business and culture innovative ideas, the new prime minister successfully creates new grounds for a renaming exercise that may have redemptive consequences for his own. The prime minister’s flagship initiative, ‘Make India,’ is a big step in this direction, soliciting foreign direct investment in 25 key ‘sectors’ that include biotechnology, pharmaceuticals, and a notable subset: stem cells. If India is indeed a good place to do business, then the business of stem cells has to be protected, and the name of India and the stem cell terrain as a whole needs to be shielded from bad-name publicity, or badnami, that not only can have serious reputational consequences, but also result in a crisis of credibility with the potential to impact the commercial bottom line and India’s ability to attract global capital inflows (see also Bharadwaj 2009). 15 Within academic debates—most notably, social science commentaries—the key concerns have centred around issues of governance vacuum, potential for harm, patient recruitment and patient exploitation, reputational risks, and therapeutic ambivalence (Patra and Sleeboom-Faulkner 2009; Salter 2008; Sleeboom-Faulkner & Patra 2011, Prasad 2015). The protagonists, mainly clinicians and scientists, are portrayed as breathing easily in a governance vacuum or as manipulating a range of uncertainties in pursuit of reputation enhancement (Salter 2008; Sleeboom-Faulkner & Patra 2008). Disgruntled patient voices are similarly co-opted to show that treatments are often no more than loot mar (cheating) in the ‘name of stem cells’ (Sleeboom- Faulkner and Patra 2011). Specific clinics are singled out to generalize gratuitously how gullible and desperate patients are in danger of being recruited and lured into stem cell treatments. Instances where patients report positive treatment outcomes, ambivalence, and uncertainties are shown to be unresolved. In other words, patients in these

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accounts are analysed and ‘named’ as vulnerable, hopeful, ambivalent, duped, exploited, or a combination thereof. 16 At one level these conclusions are underwhelming for three key reasons. First, generalizations based on specific clinics and their collaborators tell us very little about the scientific domain as a whole, however contested. Second, any person or patient struggling with a degenerative disorder, whether static or progressive, is highly likely to occupy an ambivalent space. Even when the therapy is seemingly working it is understandable to want more improvement, greater resolution, and to ‘hope’ for more. This cannot be captured to deduce that stem cell interpolations are not working as imagined or promised. Stem cells aside, even in the adjudicated terrain of so-called mainstream biomedical therapies held to be scientifically validated and purportedly safe, a straightforward resolution or outcome is seldom available. Third, much of this scholarship deploys the vocabulary of ‘ethics,’ ‘governance,’ ‘experimental,’ and ‘(un)safe’ as fully formed and as taken-for-granted categories. Like the notion of name in this article, each of these concepts should be vivisected to reveal the cultural complexities animating their named presence in our professional lexicon. Instead, most social science accounts, whether unwittingly or wilfully, end up contributing to the production of a badnam ‘geography of blame.’ 17 A critical understanding of the stem cell terrain in India needs a more substantiated and corroborated understanding of the field. But more important, it demands that the researcher abandon his or her precarious perch on the fence and get down to the difficult analytical task of revealing how a therapy and its workings are constructed, understood, and eventually assimilated. Very often the objective fence-sitting risks looking like a tactical move to distance from a potential bad sur-name in the making. In this scene of sophisticated academic name-calling, academic reputations are also at stake: being too close or too distant from the object of study can further imbricate the value-laden terrain of social science positioning and spectating. Social scientists, like the natural scientists and clinicians they ‘study,’ are in the business of making a name for themselves and establishing a reputation in their chosen fields of expertise. In these accounts we find that rather than understanding the anatomy of a bad name in the making, not too dissimilarly from their natural-science and journalistic counterparts, social scientists are either actively distancing themselves from a scene of badnami or constructing one by deploying theoretical and analytical tools that produce an illusion of objective distance from a purportedly unethical ‘scene’ under scrutiny. In my own work, this has been a source of much reflection and critical self-appraisal, a source of constant questioning of my tools, techniques, and ability to understand and explain notions of therapy, efficacy, harm, cure, disease, and the politics underscoring these troubled relationships (e.g., Bharadwaj 2013). However, new emerging insights are instigating refreshing new perspectives on the vexed question of stem cell governance and asking pertinent questions such as ‘what does the effort to debate and govern stem cell therapy conceal as well as reveal about India’s engagement with biomedicine?’ (Tiwari & Ramana 2014: 415). At this juncture it seems very likely that as the conversation evolves the terrain will move towards a more nuanced and reflexive engagement in naming the stem cell terrain, in keeping with its dynamic nature.

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The ethnographic backdrop

18 My ethnographic focus is a small clinical facility in New Delhi, a site where I have conducted stem cell fieldwork since 2002. The small clinical facility is an outlier to the extent that it is a marginal player in the high-stakes field of stem cell science in India and around the globe. However, the clinic offers a compelling illustration of the politics of making bad and good names and forms part of a multi-sited ethnographic project. In this article I am seeking to trace the metaphors of badnam and badnami through multiple terrains to piece together a fragment seemingly scattered in disparate domains ranging from local and global bio-scientific controversies to multi-media reports, which Marcus (1995) in his original formulation describes as one of the most important sites for cultivating a fully formed multi-sited ethnographic practice, to everyday ethnographic encounters and conversations in mundane settings. Largely, this article draws on intensive and longitudinal participant observation in the previously mentioned clinical facility and on fieldwork in other parts of India as well as local and global media reports, along with interviews and daily conversations with the clinic director. This ongoing research is examining stem cell technologies in India and the contested nature of stem cell science in the ethical as well as regulatory landscape in India. The very act of naming and separating good science from bad science appears to drive these developments. A multiplicity of actors—from the Indian state to private stem cell start-ups as well as local and global patients in search of stem cell therapies— have come to have a vested interest in the ‘correct and fair naming’ of the Indian stem cell terrain. The global bio-scientific adjudications and pronouncements on what constitutes good-name science have only exacerbated the contest on naming the unnameable depths of scientific and cellular therapeutic potential (Bharadwaj 2013a, 2013c). Interactions with the growing number of Indian and foreign-treatment seekers are yielding insights into the contingent nature of healing, agency, and wider reaction to hESC-based therapies. Treatment seekers from different parts of the world reported that the professional and biomedical response in their countries of origin was to (sur-)name them as gullible dupes being manipulated by guileful stem cell mavericks in India. The good/gullible and bad/guileful naming of players in this infinitely complex field of global travel for stem cell therapies reveals just another layer in the (re)naming practices haunting the emerging stem cell terrain in India (see Bharadwaj 2012, 2013c).

19 In this article all names are kept anonymous to preserve confidentiality, as per the ethical protocols at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, Geneva, and the European FP7 framework guidelines. However, where interviewees expressly asked to be identified by their first names no anonymity was attempted. Also, in accordance with prevailing institutional and European Commission FP7 framework ethical injunctions, I have attempted to keep the identity of the clinic or the clinic director anonymous. However, I am well aware I may not succeed, as both feature prominently in global-media debates and regulatory, as well as scientific, public spheres (see Bharadwaj & Glasner 2009). The very act of sur-naming research- participant and related entities such as clinic names creates ironic but creative solutions involving names and what they are held to reveal, mask, and make explicit if uttered and made unsafe through the modality of naming. The bureaucratic logic that seeks to ‘save the name’ via sur-naming echoes what Das describes (2015) as a kavacha (shield name), which protects a child from ghosts, who are cunningly

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deluded into thinking the child’s public name is the real name (which is only known to the parents). The bureaucratic shielding of the research subject from potential harmful exposure creates conditions where only the researcher knows the real, asli, name (see Saria 2015). In other words, everything ‘except’ the name becomes nameable in order to ‘save the name.’

Badnam science

20 My ongoing conversation with the clinic director began in 2002. Throughout my interactions she has shown reflexive awareness about the source of criticism haunting her clinical work, which is in danger should the Indian lawmakers ratify the proposed legislation demanding DCGI-approved clinical trials for stem cell therapies. In the first phase of my interactions (2002–2005) we discussed the promise of stem cells and the challenges in proving safety and efficacy. This was at a time when human embryonic stem cells were being ‘named’ globally as the most potent source of regeneration. The second phase (2005–2010) moved the conversation towards clinical and therapeutic work; this was also when international criticism and peer outrage began to gain prominence and become consolidated in the public domain in India and beyond. The name-calling from peers and journalists alike made her reflect and focus closely on her location in India and the potential prejudice in the Euro-American terrain towards biomedical breakthroughs in distant parts of the globe (e.g., Guardian 2005). For example, in 2008 a team of British scientists discovered antibiotic-resistant bacteria and proceeded to name it New Delhi Metallo-beta-lactamase-1 (NDM-1). By about 2010, the naming controversy had spread to India and was heavily criticized by the Indian state and the scientific community alike. The NDM-1 team leader, Dr. Walsh, advised people to ‘think long and hard’ before undergoing treatment in Indian hospitals (Narayan 2010). As this controversy was unfolding the clinic director saw this as just another example of bad-name politics on a global scale: You take the issue of the super bug they have accused, they have done a research and they have published in the Lancet. Now I will question the Lancet editor as to why he allowed that to happen if he is supposed to be the editor of the most reputable peer-reviewed journal, how did he allow an article with 35 patients to be published? They are saying there is a new Delhi super bug, they named it after my city, and that 35 patients came in and got the super bug, so don’t go to India for surgery; how can you know that? Did you have proof that this patient did not carry this bug into India and went back with it? Number two, how can you pass such a statement in a journal, then what do you say, you say that this a Euro-American kind of bias, this is the biggest proof I think of as to how they don’t want anyone else’s medical, scientific breakthroughs or services to flourish. 21 The naming and name-calling in this controversy was unprecedented, as the Lancet, which published the breakthrough, openly accused the Indian government of ‘suppressing’ the truth about the presence of drug-resistant bacteria in Delhi’s public water system (Indian Express 2011). The controversy, however, only reinforced the fear of well-orchestrated badnami and its ability to truncate names and indelibly attach itself to people and places.

22 The third and ongoing phase of my conversation with the clinic director (2010–2015) hybridized the focus of the earlier phases, as the clinic director began reflecting on a continued failure to communicate her work to her peers and her location in a

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constructed ‘geography of blame.’ She felt both factors were offering her detractors the ammunition to tarnish her reputation and name. For example, since 2011 she has believed that the media name-calling has resulted in an inability to publish papers in scientific journals. She remains hopeful that publishing her data will lead to a new sur- name, quite possibly a good cleansed name, vindicating her work thus far. When asked in 2013 whether she thought ignorance and the fear of the unknown were brought on by a lack of published data, she concurred: ‘Absolutely! Come on, Third World country, India, stem cells, we can’t even handle our traffic, I understand, I get that, I get that, they are sceptical. At the same time I know my thing is working.’ In her assessment, publishing data was only part of the solution. The location of her work was also largely badnam. I often probed deeper when she referenced an unknown ‘they’ as the source of opprobrium and bad name: AB: Who are the ‘they’? CD: ‘They,’ let’s say CNN, for example, their choice of patients, choice of words, but they give me a one-hour documentary, and then they have the cheek to come to my country, my city, and my everything and have an entire discussion on my work without inviting me, I mean that shows me I am important, that’s wonderful! Let them criticize me. 23 In 2012, CNN had caused a small ripple with their documentary on her stem cell therapies. I had a ringside view to the five days of shooting at the clinic and the series of interviews with the clinic director as well as many of the in-patients (I later learned they interviewed patients in the US over several months). However, many of these patients did not make it to the final cut, and in the words of the clinic director, ‘they chose to speak to a patient who had improved but could not speak for himself, with divorcing parents who were not speaking to each other.’ The documentary had deployed the tell-tale signs of an Orientalizing trope and some glaring factual inaccuracies. For example, the voice-over describes how disabled patients, in this ‘less than luxurious facility,’ were forced to use toilets down the corridor. However, all patient rooms have attached disabled-friendly bathrooms. The clinic director later quipped that truthful narrative would have done little for the bad-name science drama CNN was seeking to relay to the world.

24 On 14 August 2012 CNN screened the documentary in the India International Centre in New Delhi. The screening was for an invited audience, but the clinic director was not invited. However, as she later recalled, ‘unfortunately I was there.’ AB: How did you get there? CD: I was there for another programme. AB: What programme? CD: A birthday party. (Laughs) CD: People recognized me in the toilet: ‘Hey, your program is up there.’ I said, ‘Hey, let me go up there!’ AB: You’re joking, you’re making this up? CD: No I am not, I never joke, and I never speak an untruth. I walked in, I sat down, and they were towards the end of the screening, and then they got up and asked, Yes, are there any comments, so I stood up and said, ‘As this programme is about me and I have not been invited and I am busy, I need to say a few words,’ and I spoke a few words to the audience. AB: And what was the reaction? CD: The audience thought it was a very one-sided program and they [CNN] were out to get me. In fact I got few patients from that audience thereafter! And then the CNN chief I think was very kind to ask whether he could come back again, and I said you’re most welcome anytime, [but] speak the truth!

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25 The growing media interest in her work and the very public naming and renaming of the clinic director had become an established trend by 2012. If anything the name- calling and trial by media was getting shrill. The Guardian story that set the ball rolling in 2005 cited experts who unanimously concluded that her stem cell story was ‘highly implausible and frankly downright dangerous. If the Indian government wants to promote stem cell research, then it needs to seriously look at regulation of these doctors and if necessary close them down.’ Similarly, a host of media reports alluded to the clinic director as a ‘dangerous maverick’ (see Sky News 2006, 2007; Telegraph 2007, 2008; Fitzpatrick & Griffin 2012). The conclusion was unanimous that such maverick clinicians were bringing the science of stem cell into disrepute and giving scientists everywhere a bad name. The clinic director, however, has repeatedly hit back, arguing that her name is being dragged through the mud and despite dramatic reversals in several patients, she is unfairly ostracized and her name wilfully maligned. Asked whether she felt largely discredited she responded, ‘No, I never feel discredited. My patients give me all the credit. I don’t need any outside stamp of approval for feeling good about my work.’

26 Many clinicians and stem cell practitioners around India see patients and patient testimonies as a natural corrective. A disgruntled or harmed patient can result in serious badnami. A negative testimonial also instils a fear of losing patients as well as losing face. The consequences are both reputational and financial. Bad+name is not good for business. For example, Forbes magazine articulated these bad-name reputational fears most explicitly in a 2013 article, when it claimed that ‘fearing that unscrupulous use may hijack this promising field [stem cells in India], stakeholders are racing to regulate its applications.’ The main fear articulated in the news piece was that of reputation, a fear of losing credibility. By citing several ‘expert’ testimonials, the piece cautions how ‘between the huge unmet human need for treatment of incurable diseases and the hype around the possibilities of these therapies on one side, and the opportunistic and unscrupulous physicians exploiting the situation on the other, good science [emphasis added] struggles to move forward…’ (Forbes 2013). 27 A closer reading of the concerns in this article reveals the financial potential of stem cell markets globally and the Indian potential stalked by concerns about poor reputation. The article (guess)timates the global potential as being around 1.2 billion in 2012 and growing at 30% to reach 16 billion by 2017, 600 million of which would be the Indian-market segment. The article valorises ‘experts’ it cites as ‘rooted in science’ against the unscrupulous elements that by implication only feign scientific know-how. Making a strong pitch for the commercial potential of stem cells, the article cites Minger, who moved from King’s College London to GE Healthcare, as ‘he thought the time was right for commercialization,’ arguing that the international marketplace needs regulation so that ‘the reputation of regenerative medicine is not compromised.’ The vulnerable (sur-)name of an unnameable entity, ‘stem cell science,’ continues to oscillate between the good- and bad-named protagonists. What journalistic ventures such as the Forbes article discussed previously and the larger scientific establishment fail to capture in any meaningful way is that names are not just vulnerable, but also seldom permanent. Reputational fears of good going bad or bad going good remain an inadequate possibility because the unnameable aspect of an entity or person is adept at manifesting the unutterable concealed by a (sur-)name.

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A bad name by another name

It’s centrifuged blood: that’s all. They are drawing blood from patients, centrifuging it in a lab in Bangalore for six to seven thousand rupees and injecting it back into patients for two lakh rupees. They do this, and stem cells get badnam. If this doesn’t stop, stem cells will become a badnam science, you know? People simply don’t care; it’s just another get rich quick scheme, never mind the damage to the reputation, never mind the badnami. 28 It was just another Wednesday afternoon as the clinic director and I sipped tea in her office. The outpatient rush had subsided, and we discussed the complexities of the Indian stem cell terrain. Her criticism of ‘rogue’ stem cell clinics in India was ironically paraphrasing castigations she routinely received in the local and global media. The outburst was also ironic, as the revised ICMR-DBT (2013) guidelines had singled out hematopoietic stem cells as permissible. It was clear from the guidelines that ‘minimal manipulation’ of stem cells via centrifuging, so long as under aseptic, GMP and GLP (good laboratory practice) conditions, did not need Institutional Committee for Stem Cell Research oversight nor DCGI approval. The bureaucratic and bio-scientific renaming of centrifuged blood as stem cells was another fascinating development underscoring the emergence of politics of (re)naming biogenetic artefacts. After all, clinical use of entities such as bone marrow is decades old and yet renaming bone marrow as stem cells recasts something old and familiar into a new and strange entity needing robust governance.

29 That a range of mavericks and mavens populate the stem cell terrain in India is beyond dispute. However, local and global media hyperbolae often paint the Indian terrain as uniformly maverick. This deepening badnami is cause for much worry, as several clinicians working on the forefront of stem cell therapies in India resist standardized ‘good science’ prescriptions emanating from the ‘West’ (Bharadwaj 2013a, 2013b). Ironically this resistance only reproduces tropic templates of ‘good and bad name science’ in a rapidly globalizing biotechnology. In other words, in this global scene any entity can acquire a bad name: the science of stem cells (a fear routinely invoked by ‘Western experts’), individual clinicians (in India and beyond), and cellular form itself (as inherently dangerous). At every level, names and reputations appear vulnerable, precariously close to going bad. 30 The everyday clinical encounters with stem cells in a reputational and bad-name vacuum are far from straightforward. For example, as noted elsewhere (Bharadwaj 2013b), on one of my regular visits to the clinic I witnessed a chronic spinal-cord-injury patient move his toes and lift both his legs. The patient had moved his legs for the first time in fifteen years, a dramatic moment for him and the clinic director. The clinic director appeared vindicated, as if the patient, by moving his legs, had validated the therapeutic efficacy of stem cells. Her excitement was tempered by the fact that this breakthrough would count for nothing. Resigned but equally elated she quipped, ‘This is headline news; if this were happening in America or Europe, forget lifting his leg. Even if he were moving his toes, they would be hailing it as a breakthrough of the century.’ Smiling, she continued, ‘But wrong place. It is not meant to be happening here, right?’ The isolation and ostracism of a bad name made it possible for her to imagine the likely outcome and quietly accept it. It is as if a bad name renders worthless all achievements; name and place conflate and conspire to produce a favourable outcome with an unfavourable name. It is interesting to note that

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many patients absorb the stigma of badnam science. It is as if the very act of embracing a therapeutic modality embedded in the badnam science renders them gullible, desperate, and duped. That is to say badnami comes to attach itself to a patient’s body and erases the individual to an extent to produce a cohort that has lost all sense of judgment, reasoning, and the will to exercise caution (Bharadwaj 2013b). Despite the long, tireless history of researching stem cells and clinical facilities around the globe and in India, informal participation and patient-support networks are similarly erased from scientific and journalistic assessments (Bharadwaj 2013b). The surrender of reason and surrender of one’s corporeality is conflated. The bad-name science is bestowed with dark powers that can ensnare while incanting a state of collective bad faith. 31 It is crucial to understand that badnami is a localized event that can reverberate much further. In the present case, aspersions of badnam science are localized within a scientific polity that is ‘consensually constructed by scientists and implemented from within a specific view of science that sees in its putative modality all the necessary conditions to normatively support, ideologically discipline, and structurally contain the experiment’ (Bharadwaj 2013c: 86). The global politics of science see this context as fundamental to cordoning off adjudicated spaces in which only a consensible rule ordained ‘good’ name science could thrive. The notion of ethics is as standardized as the fantasy body of a good-name science that can be globalized cross-culturally to mean the same thing. However, on a number of occasions through the course of my daily conversations with the clinic director I learned that ethics were not so much variable or in some essentialist sense contingent or relative to particular cultures but rather universal in ways that bureaucratized ethics embedded in bioethical discourse couldn’t possibly accommodate. Through the course of our conversations over the years the clinic director has repeatedly maintained how ‘it’s not that I am unethical; I am perfectly ethical, but my ethical work is seldom recognized as such.’ And yet, I could not understand the resistance towards standardized ethical protocols and peer- endorsed practice that would have let the clinic off the hook without the attendant inconvenience of acquiring a bad name. However, one winter evening in 2014, a chance conversation with the director offered an interesting peek into the fascinating world of stem cell science purportedly going badnam when she said: We never opted for a clinical trial because we are against giving placebos. The patient is the control because there is chronicity, and it is not fair to treat a patient with a placebo, especially if an ALS [Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis] patient is coming to you who is going down every day. The institutional ethics committee [made the] decision a very long time ago that there [would] be no placebo, as it is against our ethics; we can’t stand back and watch an ALS or motor-neuron disease patient rapidly worsen and die; it is against our ethics. 32 At first I understood this outburst as a pursuit of ‘local good’ circumscribed by contingent ethics that are produced in relation to sensibilities populating the everyday engagement with life. It seemed that from the ivory tower of big, baroque science, badnam-science interpolations into human biology appear dangerous, destructive, and unruly. However, a closer reading reveals a wilful and willing embrace of badnami. The ethics of good-name science is easy to accomplish, but the daily struggles of terminal and incurable patients made it impossible for the clinic to stage-manage its good name.

33 I have followed ALS patients since 2012 and am very aware of how viciously the disease attacks stem cell insertions. Constantly beating back a progressive and aggressive

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condition is the only viable recourse. I met Warner (pseudonym) on his first-ever visit to the clinic in May 2013. In Germany, where he was first diagnosed in early 2013 with ALS, he was given fewer than three months to live. A qualified surgeon who understands biomedical prognostications, he looked for alternatives to fight the rapid progression of ALS. A colleague who had patients return to Germany after successful stem cell treatments in the clinical facility in New Delhi suggested he try embryonic stem cell treatment. 34 I first met Warner when in the clinic director’s consultation room. He was trembling, and his hands and arms were shaking with festiculations. The quivering skin and muscle spasms were incessant, and his speech was slow and on occasions muffled. Through the course of the treatment at the clinic I witnessed his body stabilise to the point where one had to peer closely at his skin to find spasmodic activity such as continuous twitching. By the time he returned, Warner was very stable, felt immensely energetic, and walked unassisted. 35 In May 2014, exactly a year after his first treatment, I flew to Berlin to meet him. It was a sunny May morning as I rang the doorbell of his suburban home ensconced in a meticulously planted garden. Much to my surprise, he answered the door and ushered me into the front room where his in-laws together with his wife greeted me with homemade cake and tea. Warner updated me on his progress. He was continuing to get stronger and could even work part time. And since the debilitating condition fought back his recovery narrative was punctuated by stories of setbacks and extreme elation as his body fought back. He shared his ‘peak flow’ graph that meticulously tracked his daily progress through the months of March, April, and May. The upward trajectory of his progress was heartening. A little later that evening we all left his home and walked two blocks to a neighbourhood restaurant for dinner. The whole evening was spent talking and laughing as Warner enjoyed his food and a few beers—not once did he balk or complain of exhaustion. A little later that year Warner returned to Delhi for his ‘top- up dose,’ and after a few months of sustained treatment he returned in early 2015. He often told me how he knows when it is time to go to India for a top-up and likened his daily struggle with ALS as a battle where he needs to reinforce his defences with embryonic stem cells. When asked whether he was among the lucky few who survive ALS with little or minimal medical treatment, Warner confronted me with accumulating evidence that showed a clear correlation between the time lapsed since stem cell insertions and his worsening condition as well as a subsequent pick up in progress after stem cell interpolations. He often says he doesn’t need to convince anyone; he knew he was getting better but had to go on fighting. 36 As many millions around the globe perish each year awaiting ethically produced translational research, the reputational fears of good-name science barely conceal the ‘ethical violence’ that does little to tarnish its name. It takes a giant such as the CRIM to veer off the ethical track for a bad name to become a haunting presence. However, in the case of the Indian clinic, and bad (sur-)named science, an unnameable good appears to be gestating in prolonging ALS-afflicted lives. Whether it will precipitate a (sur-)name change is another matter altogether. But, as in the case of the CRIM, the vulnerable name conceals an unspecified aspect that comes forth demanding a new (sur-)name.

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Conclusion

37 A bad name is a sur-name, that is, except/save an unnameable, unspecified aspect that survives and resurrects to truncate what a sur-name, good or bad, can mean in a given context. The (sur)names are uncanny and enchantment par excellence. They can trick and dissimulate (Das 2015); precipitate contests overs real/asli and unreal/nakli names (Saria 2015) or, as in this case, render names impermanently (sur-)named as bad or good. The negative theology implicit in Derrida’s argument makes one confront the ‘open texture of a name,’ that is, a multiplicity of names engendering a multiplicity of possibilities, which Das expertly describes in this collection. For Derrida, God is the name of a ‘bottomless collapse,’ of ‘an endless desertification of language’ (1995: 55–56). The ‘referential transcendence of language,’ according to Derrida, is to say God is beyond his images, beyond the idol, or beyond what is said, seen, or known of him. Just as negative theology ‘refuses,’ ‘denies,’ and ‘rejects’ all the ‘inadequate attributions’ (1995: 69), a name, good or bad, remains at best an ‘inadequate attribution.’ A negative procedure allows us to grapple with everything except the name that keeps the possibility of renaming safe and a procedure for saving the name ever present. In other words, good or bad names exist, ‘save/except’ the unnameable aspects beyond the name. This unique quality inhered in a name leaves open ended the possibility of canny and uncanny manifestations from beyond the name to impact and truncate a name.

38 In India it is widely recognized that the world’s second and India’s first IVF baby was born sixty-seven days after the birth of Louise Brown, on 25 July 1978. On 3 October 1978, Dr. Subhas Mukherjee announced the birth of Durga in Calcutta. Dr. Mukherjee is credited with many firsts in the world of reproductive and infertility medicine, including the use of gonadotropins for ovarian stimulation, a transvaginal route for harvesting oocytes, and the freezing and thawing of human embryos before transferring them to the uterus. Although he published a short note on his work in the Indian Journal of Cryogenics, his claim was largely discredited. Deprived of any opportunity to pursue his research, public humiliation and ridicule from his peers eventually resulted in Mukherjee taking his own life in 1981. The badnam ‘quack’ was to remain unrecognized until the late 1990s, when his diaries, papers, and research data were resurrected. The circumstances leading to Mukherjee’s suicide and the politics behind his subsequent reinstatement as the ‘scientific father’ of India’s first and the world’s second ‘test-tube baby’ are analysed elsewhere (Bharadwaj 2002). Here I remind myself that bad name and badnami can have dangerous consequences. Mukerjee’s name is now purified to the extent that he is hailed, by the very establishment that drove him to suicide, as the scientific father of the first test-tube baby in India and the second in the world. Names can be restored, but restoration is not the same as re-establishing the previous one. Salvaging a bad name entails renaming. Nothing is salvaged, reclaimed, or regained. The new name is a new start, a precarious journey of a vulnerable new name. 39 The story of stem cells in India is similarly replete with ironies. The ‘pro-cure’ rhetoric of ‘good (sur-)named/good science’ that enabled the CIRM in the United States to come into existence is seemingly bearing fruit in distant ‘bad+sur+named’ Indian clinics, where stem cell therapies are thriving and in some quarters producing results. Another irony is centred on the need for external validation and credibility, as shown by the clinic director cited previously as saying, ‘My patients give me all the credit. I don’t

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need any outside stamp of approval.’ The global-media reports are replete with expert testimonials either condemning the clinic or doubting the reported outcomes whilst grudgingly reporting breakthroughs that appear to be making a difference. 40 The Forbes report discussed previously had similarly criticized the clinic by stating ‘personal testimonies are not scientific data, and this distinction needs to be made when reporting these stories [of treatment breakthroughs] […] some clinics [‘naming’ the clinic and the clinic director] are beginning to understand this…’ (2013). What the Forbes report and several other journalistic accounts failed to grasp was that the clinic had steadfastly opposed scientific publications in peer-reviewed journals on legal advice to protect its pending patent application, a somewhat unusual but not uncommon practice across the globe (see Bharadwaj 2013a). This refusal, however, further cemented the bad-name credentials of the clinic, and many scientific and journalistic quarters wilfully (mis)understood this as further evidence of the clinic’s suspect and poor scientific practice. From 2013 to 2014, the clinic was granted 65 patents around the globe. As if on cue, the clinic director began submitting several articles detailing everything from the science behind the stem cell interpolations to treatment protocol and systematic data on treatment outcomes broken down by terminally progressive and incurable static disorders for peer review in international scientific journals. At last count seventeen articles have appeared in peer-reviewed journals. The bold and radical departure from a peer-endorsed modality of stem cell procurement, culture, and administration has now become validated, but the clinic director is still waiting for a verdict on her attempt to cross an important passage point, peer-reviewed journal articles, and whether this will result in a landmark scientific publication. As these articles circulate and are scrutinized the prefix may switch from bad to good. And it is not long before the curtain goes up on the penultimate scene in this bad-name drama.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bharadwaj, Aditya (2002) ‘Conception Politics: Medical Egos, Media Spotlights, and the Contest Over Test-tube Firsts in India’, in Marcia Inhorn & Frank Vanbalen (ed.), Infertility Around the Globe, Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. 315–33.

Bharadwaj, Aditya (2012) ‘Enculturating Cells: Anthropology, Substance, and Science of Stem Cells’, Annual Review of Anthropology, 41, pp. 303–17.

Bharadwaj, Aditya (2013a) ‘Ethic of Consensibility, Subaltern Ethicality: The Clinical Application of Embryonic Stem Cells in India’, BioSocieties, 8(1), pp. 25–40.

Bharadwaj, Aditya (2013b) ‘Subaltern Biology? Local Biologies, Indian Odysseys, and the Pursuit of Human Embryonic Stem Cell Therapies’, Medical Anthropology, 32(4), pp. 359–73.

Bharadwaj, Aditya (2013c) ‘Experimental Subjectification: The Pursuit of Human Embryonic Stem Cells in India’, Ethnos, 79(1), pp. 84–107.

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Bharadwaj, Aditya (2014) ‘Episcience: The Biological and Epistemic Plasticity of Stem Cells in India’, paper presented in the annual conference for the Society for Social Studies of Science (4S), Buenos Aires, 23/08/2014.

Bharadwaj, Aditya; Glasner, Peter (2009) Local Cells, Global Science: The Proliferation of Stem Cell Technologies in India, London: Routledge.

Das, Veena (2015) ‘Naming, Aspect Dawning and the Physiognomy of Words’, SAMAJ, 12.

DCGI (2013) ‘Guidance Document for Regulatory Approvals of Stem Cell and Cell Based Products (SCCPs)’, Document No. STEM CELL AND CELL BASED PRODUCTS (SCCPs)/SPS/2013-001 Version: 004, 30 Dec.

Derrida, Jacques (1986) Glas, John Leavey, Jr., and Richard Rand (trans.), Lincoln & London: University of Nebraska Press.

Derrida, Jacques (1995) On the Name, Thomas Dutoit (ed.), David Wood, John Leavey, Jr., & Ian McLeod (trans.), Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Derrida, Jacques (2002) Acts of Religion, New York: Routledge.

Dutoit, Thomas (1995) Translating the Name? In On the Name, Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Fitzpatrick, David; Griffin, Drew (2012) ‘Family Hangs Hope for Boy on Unproven Therapy in India’, CNN Special Investigations Unit, 21 May, URL: http://www.cnn.co.uk/2012/05/19/health/ embryonic-stem-cell-therapy/index.html.

Forbes (2013) ‘Stem Cell Industry: The Battle Within’, Forbes.com, 12 February, URL: http:// forbesindia.com/article/real-issue/stem-cells-industry-the-battle-within/34697/0.

Franklin, Sarah (1990) ‘Deconstructing ‘Desperateness’: The Social Construction of Infertility in Popular Representations of New Reproductive Technologies’, in Maureen McNeil, Ian Varcoe & Steven Yearley (eds.), The New Reproductive Technologies, London: Macmillan, pp. 200–29.

The Guardian (2005) ‘Row Over Doctor’s’ Miracle Cures’’, TheGuardian.com, 18 November, URL: http://www.theguardian.com/science/2005/nov/18/stemcells.controversiesinscience.

Hiltzik, Michael (2014) ‘California’s Stem Cell Scandal Gets Worse’, LATimes.com, 25 July, URL: http://www.latimes.com/business/hiltzik/la-fi-mh-californias-stem-cell-scandal-20140725- column.html#page=1.

ICMR-DBT (2013) ‘Guidelines for Stem Cell Research’, Indian Council of Medical Research, URL: http://icmr.nic.in/guidelines/NGSCR%202013.pdf.

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Indian Express (2011) ‘India ‘Suppressing’ Truth about Presence of NDM-I, says Lancet’, Sun Apr 10, URL: http://archive.indianexpress.com/news/india-supressing-truth-about-presence-of- ndmi-says-lancet/774209/0.

Jayaraman, K.S. (2014) ‘Unproven stem cell therapy banned: Companies call the move ‘illogical’ and say it could hurt medical tourism’, URL: http://www.natureasia.com/en/nindia/article/ 10.1038/nindia.2014.39.

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Narayan, Pushpa (2010) ‘India Trashes ‘Superbug’ Report, Says it’s Doctored’, Times of India, URL: http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/India-trashes-superbug-report-says-its-doctored/ articleshow/6301982.cms.

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Patra, P. K.; Sleeboom-Faulkner, M. (2009) ‘Bionetworking: Experimental Stem Cell Therapy and Patient Recruitment in India’, Anthropology & Medicine, 16(2), pp. 147–63.

Prasad, Amit (2015) ‘Ambivalent Journeys of Hope: Embryonic Stem Cell Therapy in a Clinic in India’, Health, 19(2), pp. 137–15.

Salter, B (2008) ‘Governing Stem Cell Science in China and India: Emerging Economies and the Global Politics of Innovation’, New Genetics and Society, 27(2), pp. 145–59.

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Sleeboom-Faulkner, M.; Patra, P. K. (2008) ‘The Bioethical Vacuum: National Policies on Human Embryonic Stem Cell Research in India and China’, Journal of International Biotechnology Law, 5(6), pp. 221–34.

Sleeboom-Faulkner, M.; Patra, P. K. (2011) ‘Experimental Stem Cell Therapy: Biohierarchies and Bionetworking in Japan and India’, Social Studies of Science, 41(5), pp. 645–66.

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ABSTRACTS

The range of the implicit meanings of badnam (bad name) stop short of unpacking the complexity underscoring the implied soiling and spoiling of ‘name’: the crucible of reputation, honour, and dignity. What happens when diverse stakeholders working in the burgeoning and high-stakes field of stem cell science in India fear badnami, ignominy (to invoke one possible meaning), in the context of a regulatory flux and fears of rapidly deepening reputation of the field as a maverick site for stem cell research and clinical application? Drawing on longitudinal research mapping the stem cell technology terrain in India and the changing fortunes of a small clinical facility, this article shows how the spectre of ‘spoilt name’ (or badnami) haunts professional narratives and how scientific validation, national honour, economic viability, therapeutic efficacy, and safety come to reside in the ‘name.’ The article conceptualizes ‘name’ as inherently vulnerable and examines its threatened status to highlight the unnameable, unspecified aspect that survives demanding a new name despite the ethics and politics implicit in naming and ‘name-calling.’

INDEX

Keywords: stem cells, India, bad name, science, badnam

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AUTHOR

ADITYA BHARADWAJ

Research Professor, Anthropology and Sociology of Development, Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, Geneva

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Names and the Critique of History in Urdu Literature: From Manto’s ‘Yazid’ to Zaigham’s ‘Shakuntala’

Gregory Maxwell Bruce

1 Names and naming in Urdu have been the subject of Urdu, Islamic, and South Asian cultural studies in past decades, but little if any attention has been paid to the role that naming plays in imaginative and critical literary contexts. Urdu dictionaries and anthologies of names record astrological, numerological, religious, aesthetic, and historical information on names and are designed to assist in name selection (Said 1996; Muhammad 1990; Adil 1998; Bano 1974). Relevant English reference books focus on the linguistic, religious, and ethnographic aspects of names and naming to facilitate broader understanding of naming practices in South Asia in general and the Hind-Urdu world in particular (Zaidi 1989: 73–82; Schimmel 1989; Gandhi 1992; Roy & Rizvi 2002). The significance and breadth of such work notwithstanding, it offers little by way of perspective on the ways in which names and naming practices are contested and debated or insight into the role that names and naming play in imaginative literature.

2 This essay discusses the significance of names in South Asian culture through translation and close reading of works by two Urdu authors, Saadat Hasan Manto (1912–1955) and Zaigham (b. 1964). In his relatively short career, Manto produced a prolific number of short stories, screenplays for radio and television, and translations of European literature. Shortly after Partition, Manto penned a short essay entitled ‘Kucchh Nāmon ke Bāre Men’ [‘Some Thoughts about Names’]. In the essay, Manto sets his satirical sights on naming practices among Indo-Muslim families, modern naming practices among progressive writers, the Bombay film industry, and celebrity names. Explicit and implicit in his satirical critique are the connections among South Asian naming practices and the politics of class, communal and religious identity, modernity, gender, socio-political violence, and linguistic communalism. This essay

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first examines Manto’s satirical critique of naming practices in ‘Some Thoughts about Names.’ Then it moves to a close reading of Manto’s short story ‘Yazid,’ in which Manto discusses the power of names to engender violence or to change the course of history. 3 Manto’s life and works have been extensively discussed in English and Urdu. Literary historian Muhammad Sadiq focuses on aspects of Manto’s work related to Partition and sexuality, and generalizes that Manto was inclined towards ‘the physically disgusting’ and affected ‘detachment’ both from his subjects and his readers (Sadiq 1984: 587–88). Matthews, Shackle, and Husain describe Manto’s work as a product of the All India Progressive Writers Association, a reformist literary movement founded in 1935, which created space in Urdu literature for Manto to experiment with form and to use literature as a vehicle for social reform. They emphasize that although Manto began his career as a member of the Progressive Writers Association, he soon came to clash with its leaders over what they deemed the ‘obscene’ and ‘perverted’ aspects of his work (Matthews et al. 1985: 121–23). 4 Recent scholarship on Manto has called attention to the need to revisit these characterizations of Manto’s writing, and has allowed for a more nuanced, contextualized reading of Manto’s work. The two satirical essays and one short story by Manto examined in this essay were written shortly after Partition during a period of Manto’s life that Ayesha Jalal examines as a ‘postcolonial moment’ in her recent biography of Manto (Jalal 2013: 151–86). Translator and critic Rakhshanda Jalil judges that Manto’s later work, to which the pieces in this essay belong, has been unfairly characterized as ‘dark’ and lacking ‘humanity’ and ‘liberalism.’ In her recent collection of translations, Jalil challenges literary historians who stereotype Manto as a writer primarily concerned with Partition, dark aspects of humanity, and sex (Jalil 2008: vii- xvi). For its part, the present essay seeks to understand Manto’s ideas about names and naming practices in his essays and stories, not to read them as part of a biographical or literary-historical project. Still it does connect some of Manto’s ideas to the context that Jalal discusses in her helpful biography, and it is hoped that readers find that the essay complements Jalil’s project to broaden the field of Manto studies. 5 Although mostly focused on Manto, this essay also translates and briefly examines a recent vignette titled ‘Shakuntala’ by the understudied Hindi and Urdu writer Ghazal Zaigham. Zaigham, who lives in Lucknow, is an -winning author in Urdu and Hindi, and a documentary filmmaker. ‘Shakuntala’ appears in her collection of Urdu short stories, Ek Tukra Dhūp Kā [A Little Piece of Sunlight], first published in 2000. She has worked as a subeditor for Hindi periodicals, an announcer for All India Radio, and has translated Hindi novels into Urdu. She comes from a family of artists and scholars. Her brother, known by his penname Adeebul Hindi [The Indian Literatus], was a scholar of Islam. Her sister, Shama Zafar Mehdi, published a collection of Urdu poetry entitled Māh-e Giriftah in 2010. Shama Zafar Mehdi’s husband, Zafar Mehdi, was a well-regarded Urdu poet who published numerous collections of Urdu poetry. As we shall see, in ‘Shakuntala,’ Zaigham recalls the classical story of ‘Shakuntala’ and the name of its eponymous heroine to call attention to issues related to sexual fantasy, gender, and popular culture. 6 By closely reading Manto and Zaigham’s writings on the politics of inscription, naming practices, discourses of violence, and classical archetypes, this essay seeks to give insight into how two modern Urdu writers use names and naming practices as vehicles for social critique.

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Naming and inscription in Bitter, Sour, Sweet

7 ‘Some Thoughts about Names’ was published in 1954, about a year before Manto’s death, in a collection entitled Talkh, Tursh, [aur] Shīrīn [Bitter, Sour (and) Sweet]. 1 Bitter, Sour, Sweet comprises fifteen short satirical essays engaging issues related to women, Urdu literary history, social mores, and religion. The essay titles, including ‘Writing on Walls,’ ‘Types of Noses,’ ‘The Question Arises,’ ‘On Coughing,’ ‘Why I Don’t Watch Films,’ ‘When My Eyes Opened Yesterday Morning,’ ‘On Iqbal Day,’ ‘Confined Women,’ ‘Faith and Certainty,’ ‘Purdah Matters,’ ‘Thirteen Kinds of Freeloaders,’ ‘Firecrackers,’ ‘Mirza Nosha’s [Ghalib’s] Life in Agra,’ and ‘Ghalib and the Full Moon [-faced Beloved]’ reflect the breadth of the subjects that Manto chose for satirical treatment. Manto published most of these essays soon after he moved from Bombay to Lahore in 1948 in the daily newspaper Imroz [Today], which was founded by Urdu literary figures Faiz Ahmad Faiz (1911–1984) and Chiragh Hasan Hasrat (1904–1955) (Fleming 1985: 17–18).

8 The opening lines of Bitter, Sour, Sweet set the stage for Manto’s critique of language, speech, religion, and progressive aesthetics in the stories and essays in the collection. In the first essay, ‘Writing on Walls,’ Manto recalls that he was astonished to discover the command ‘Do Not Write on this Wall’ written on the very wall on which writing was forbidden. Such irony leads Manto to explore the psychological motivations behind writing on walls. He extolls the virtues of writing on the bathroom walls of mosques: Go into a mosque and you’ll find progressive literature and progressive paintings scattered on the walls of its bathroom, too. Not only that, you can also acquire necessary information from these wall-writings. What kind of disposition does the mosque’s muezzin possess? What kinds of food does the imam prefer? Which of the school’s teachers emulates Mir Taqi Mir?2 Is the principal sahib popularly accepted in the college or not? You can learn hundreds of such things in a single session by studying these walls. 9 Among the virtues of bathroom walls, Manto concludes, is that they provide the author an opportunity to write freely; the words inscribed on bathroom walls are more reliable than contracts and promises. In a personal anecdote, Manto, who wrote for Indian cinema, tells us that he chose not to do business with a major film production company because, while at the company’s office to sign the contract, he went to the bathroom and read on the wall that the company did not pay its employees. He tells us that bathroom walls provide the writer with the freedom of anonymity as well as freedom from fear of governmental interference and all forms of censorship. They who write on walls enjoy freedom and independence even from the presence of angels (who record their deeds and determine their fate on the day of reckoning).

10 He continues with his observations on public and private spaces of inscription and signification, and the ironic inappropriateness of public inscriptions to their location, in his humorous discussions of film advertisements featuring the -like faces of actors such as the beautiful Naseem Bano (1916–2002) [mother of Saira Bano (b. 1944) and mother-in-law of Yusuf Khan aka (b. 1922)] plastered on the walls of graveyards in Bombay.3 He concludes the essay with a short critical discussion of the political and civil aspects of inscription, citing a case in which ‘The Corporation’ of Bombay took Pears Soap to court when the latter had its name skywritten above the city. The Corporation built its case on the grounds that the sky and atmosphere above the city, too, fell within the sphere of its control.

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11 Manto’s satirical critique of progressive aesthetics and the idiosyncrasies of contemporary popular culture in ‘Writing on Walls’ introduces themes and motifs that he develops in the other essays in Bitter, Sour, Sweet. Progressivism and religion frequently appear together and are satirized in terms of their mutually exclusive relationship. The Bombay film industry and South Asian celebrity, too, recur as subjects of Manto’s satire. Most significant to the subject of naming, however, is the issue of inscription itself and the factors—be they religious, political, aesthetic, or linguistic— that delimit the possibilities of linguistic use and expression.

Critiques of history and culture in ‘Some Thoughts about Names’

12 In ‘Some Thoughts about Names,’ Manto develops his critique of progressivism, religion, Indo-Muslim families, and South Asian popular culture. The conventional process of naming, Manto observes, involves a committed effort on the part of the family to find itself reflected in the child. Each feature of a child must be connected not only to one side of the family or another, but to a particular relative, no matter how distant, whose appearance reappears in the present: One will declare that his nose is entirely his father’s, another that it is a perfect match to his mother’s, and another will go and liken it to the maternal aunt’s brother’s father’s paternal uncle’s paternal grandfather’s nose. 4 13 Singularity and individuality are intolerable to family members, whose tireless quest to discover likeness in the child’s appearance and features Manto compares to Columbus’ quest to discover America.

14 The fervor with which family members seek to identify the origin of a child’s appearance, Manto suggests, is comparable to the passion with which they insist on contributing to the selection of the child’s name. Manto distinguishes between two types of name-givers. First are the dictator types who pay no regard to the feelings of friends and relatives, and quickly name the ‘lump of flesh and bones’ [gosht kā lothrā] before drifting off into peaceful slumber. Second are the more concerned and worldly parents, for whom assigning a name to the child is a source of great agitation and perplexity that involves the entire family. 15 Things become complicated very quickly for parents of the second type. Aunts and uncles send letters, some passive-aggressive, with names they deem appropriate. Grandparents are overbearing. The mother’s father quotes couplets by the Urdu poet Ghalib and sends a list of a thousand names. The father’s father, near death, peruses the 1300-year history of Islam and offers the names of all the famous people in it as possible names for the child. Manto suggests that the overwhelming task of keeping the feelings and desires of their relatives in mind leads parents to hasten to choose a name for their child. He also suggests that the fear of offending one family member is accompanied by the fear that, if too much care is given to honoring the family’s suggestions, the child may grow to resent his given name in adulthood. 16 Superstition [tavahhum-parastī], 5 too, Manto writes, plays an important role in the selection of names: If the boy or girl has been born after a long time or after much supplication and promising, its name, too, will be given accordingly. If it is a boy, then, for example, Allah Datta [God-Granted], Piran Datta [Pir-Granted], Khuda Bakhsh [God-

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Bestowed], Nabi Bakhsh [Prophet-Bestowed]. If it is a girl, then Allah Datti [God- Granted], Piran Datti [Pir-Granted], Khairatan [Charity or Alms], Hayatan [(God- given) Life], etc. And if God has given a boy or girl after a great number of children have died, then the name will be something like this: Allah Jivaya [God-caused-to- live], Kalan [Little dog (f.)], Kalva [Little dog], or Kalb-e Ali [Dog of Ali], etc. 17 Manto suggests that religious naming practices, too, are intertwined with tavahhum- parastī. Parents consult the Quran for augury. They commission horoscopes. They avail themselves of astrologists and fortune-tellers. They seek the opinions of pirs and fakirs. All this before they finally deem a name suitable and appropriate. But as some children mature, they begin to feel disheartened and discontented with their names, despite their parents’ emotions and feelings, and perhaps despite the trouble they took to name them. Manto suggests the following remedy: What should be done is that children remain entirely nameless until the age of maturity and consciousness. As soon as the boy or girl is able to write a poem or story, he should be told, Okay dear, now name yourself whatever you desire. By doing it this way, neither will the parents be heartbroken, nor will the children ever have occasion to complain. 18 Familial naming practices grounded in religious culture and superstition, Manto suggests, result in modern Urdu writers changing their names. In the following section of the essay, he satirizes South Asian notables who have altered their names or renamed themselves completely. Manto’s tone is at times light and good-humored, and at other times biting and caustic as he explores the relationships among progressivism, religion, and South Asian popular culture.

19 Of course, the practice of self-naming is common in Urdu literature in particular and Arab-Persianate literature in general. Urdu and Persian poets adopt a takhallus [penname], which they use in their poetry in what English critics have called ‘signature couplets.’ In ghazal lyric poetry, this is usually the final couplet [U: maqtaʿ] of a poem. Poets may adopt their given names as pennames, as Mir Taqi ‘Mir’ did, or adopt an entirely new name, as Mirza Asadullah Khan ‘Ghalib’ did. Poets write themselves into poems in most genres, but their names feature most prominently in ghazal lyric poetry. The poet usually addresses himself in ‘signature couplets,’ and often puns on the many valences of the takhallus.6 20 Manto begins his discussion of the modern practice of self-naming by satirizing the name-aesthetics of Urdu progressivism. At the time that Manto was writing ‘Some Thoughts about Names,’ the Progressive Writers Association had not only declared that progressive writers were necessarily Marxist, but also blacklisted Manto from progressive journals for his friendship with literary critics whom the PWA deemed conservative and reactionary (Jalal 2003: 164–67). Manto’s quips about progressive naming practices in ‘Some Thoughts about Names,’ therefore, can be read as a critique of the PWA’s stance on religion. He first focuses on the names of pioneers of Urdu free verse N.M. Rashid (1910–1975) and Miraji (1929–1949), and the film lyricist and literary journalist Qateel Shifai (1919–2001).7 He writes: If the famous progressive poet Nazr Muhammad’s name had been in accordance with his nature and temperament, it is clear that he would never have felt the need to cut and crop it. If he had willingly or unwillingly remained content with Nazr Muhammad, then Urdu literature would have been deprived of the progressive poetry of N.M. Rashid today. In the very beginning, that is, immediately after the cutting and cropping, he must have felt some estrangement and alienation from his

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name, but now he has grown so accustomed to it that if someone were to call him Nazr Muhammad, he would think some other person was being called. He continues: Qateel Shifai’s parents certainly did him wrong when they named him Aurangzeb. Progressive poetry and traditionalist, conservative Aurangzeb!? Who isn’t familiar with Miraji’s work? He, too, is a poet, and such a progressive poet that most of his work is above and beyond people’s understanding. His original name was Sanaullah, the meaning of which is clear [praise of Allah]. If he had remained Sanaullah, he would have been compelled to write poems whose meaning would have been clear, but because this was not Sanaullah’s purpose in life, and he wanted to write mysterious kinds of poetry, he had to name himself something of this kind. 21 Here Manto weaves together the issues inherent in self-naming with the aesthetics prevalent among progressive Urdu writers at the time. He suggests that progressive writers stand in anxious and sometimes ambivalent relation to religious identity, and obscure the markedly religious elements of their names (e.g., Muhammad) in order to appear modern according to progressive standards. He also suggests that renaming in terms of religious identity plays a major role in modern Urdu’s aesthetics of community. Miraji’s change is particularly salient in this context. Sanaullah adopts a marked Hindu feminine name that evokes in modern readers the mystical poet associated with the Vaishnava Bhakti movement, Mira Bai. One wonders what Manto means by the mysterious [pur-asrār] quality that he claims the penname affords Miraji’s poetry. Is the mystery related to the communal identity of Sanaullah, and the mysteriousness of an Urdu poet’s affecting a name associated with Hindu devotional practice?

22 Manto develops his critique of progressive Urdu literature’s relationship to religion as he discusses the name and career of Muhammad Din Taseer (1902–1950). Muhammad Din Taseer was among the earliest affiliates of the progressive writer’s movement. He was present at the movement’s iconic meeting at the Nanking Hotel in London in 1934, and later founded and edited the magazine Nairang-e Khayāl in Lahore (Mir & Mir 2006: 1–2).8 In ‘Something About Naming,’ Manto puns on Dr. (M.D.) Taseer’s name, saying that there is indeed much to be impressed by in his name [tāsīr means impression], but that ‘when you move closer to the original, all that remains is Muhammad Din [dīn means religion]. Manto again points to assumptions about the aesthetic contradiction of modern titles and religious names, writing that ‘doctor-ness is unsuitable and out of joint’ with Muhammad Din. Here, the progressive idea seems to be that to juxtapose titles associated with Western education alongside religious names amounts to an aesthetic contradiction in terms. Manto gives a number of examples that suggest that obscuring religious identity goes hand in hand with Westernization and modernity. Ahmad Shah Bukhari, Manto tells us, only feels right in the form of A.S. Bukhari, because ‘Ahmad Shah’ would have caused people’s thoughts to turn towards the Afghan general Ahmad Shah Abdali (1747–1772), and this would not have suited A.S. Bukhari’s humorous writings.9 So too with Deenanath Madhok, who, Manto tells us, changed his name to D.N. Madhok to give his name a ‘Western color like Dr. Muhammad Din Taseer.’ 23 It is important to keep in mind that around the time Manto was publishing satirical essays in Imroz, communalist politics and the violence of Partition had polarized the Urdu progressive scene. In May 1949, the All India Progressive Writers Association met in Bhivandi, near Bombay, to discuss the status of progressive literature and progressive writers in post-war India. The outcome of this meeting was a lengthy and

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divisive manifesto that accused writers who produced ‘art for art’s sake’ of misleading the people of India and rendering them complicit in capitalist and anti-Soviet political agendas.10 Coppola tells us that this group of ‘art for art’s sake’ writers included Manto, though the manifesto did not name him. As noted above, the PWA had ostracized Manto as a ‘reactionary’ for his unwillingness to identify progressive aesthetics exclusively with Marxist ideology (Coppola 1975: 295). 24 The effect of the All India Progressive Writers Association’s new stance, which stood in stark contrast to the inclusive manifesto of the previous decade, was the exclusion of authors whose socio-political leanings did not fall line with those of the organization. According to Ali Sardar Jafri, a leader of the organization, just after Partition, a number of progressive authors disassociated themselves from the movement and chose seclusion over potential political and governmental repercussions, while others broke with progressive principles and aligned themselves with conservative politics. Jafri names the aforementioned Dr. M.D. Taseer, along with his supporters and followers in Lahore, as formerly progressive authors who turned to communalism and took part in communalist political activities (Coppola 1975: 295–96). It is therefore not difficult to see how the issues of freedom of expression, progressive aesthetics, and naming that Manto raises in Bitter, Sour, Sweet connected to the increasingly constrictive and polarized intellectual and creative environment in which he was writing.11 25 Manto next attends to the issue of the shuddhī [‘purity’ or ‘purification’] of names in the context of Indian cinema. The term is closely associated with Arya Samaj proselytization efforts that began in the late 19th century and, by the 1930s, had not only become a massive conversion campaign, but also had caused the Muslim community to undertake defensive campaigns at local and institutional levels (Sikand 2003: 98–118). Manto begins with a discussion of the 1933 biopic Puran Bhagat, a film that tells the story of prince Puran, who is rescued from a death sentence by the mystic Gorakhnath and leads an army against a power-hungry general before returning to the life of an ascetic.12 26 Manto tells us that while Puran Bhagat was in production, the film’s director, , selected the Lucknow-based actor Ali Mir in the role of Puran. The film industry immediately wondered if the Hindu community would object to a Muslim playing the part. Manto abruptly switches to a Sanskritized register of Urdu to emphasize the socio-linguistic dimension of his satire on the ‘conversion’ of religious identity that shuddhī suggests. The Sanskritic vocabulary contrasts with the typical Perso-Arabic register of the essay and Manto’s writing in general. How could a Muslim assume [dhāran] the form [rūp] of such a pious devotee [bhagat], he asks? With these questions in mind, he continues: Ali Mir’s name was ‘purified’ [shuddhī] and he was presented as Kumar in the film. Manto characterizes Muslims’ adoption of Hindi stage names in Indian cinema as a ‘fashion’ [faishan]. He also suggests a cause-and-effect relationship between adopting a Hindu and popular acceptance in the Indian film industry. He cites the cases of Zakariya Khan, a ‘pure’ [thet] Pathan, better known as Jayant, and Kashmir-born Yusuf, pen-name ‘Nazr,’ better known by his stage name Dilip Kumar. He mentions the actress Tajour (also spelled Tajvar), better known by her stage name, Veena. Manto puns on Veena (the name of a stringed instrument) when he says that Tajour only began to resound and reverberate [gūnj] in films after changing her name.13

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27 Manto continues his critique of Hindu-Muslim communal politics as he satirizes the practice of adopting two-part names from which one is supposed to ‘catch a whiff’ of Hindu-Muslim unity: Shanti, Gita Nizami. He cannot make sense of Asha Posley’s14 name, and exclaims, ‘Let someone try to understand!’ Then he makes light of a name that he finds ugly, awkward, and ill-formed [be-dhab; lit. without shape]: Before the , there used to be a Vidhava Singh [lit. moon-like lion]. He was absolutely never put off by this be-dhab name, and as long as his store was here, he regularly advertised as ‘Bhai Vidhava Singh’s Achār Shaljam’ [Brother Vidhava Singh’s Turnip Pickle]. 28 Vidhava Singh’s name, of course, suggests his background is Sikh. Manto commends, perhaps ironically, the Sikh community for its steadfastness, and seems to admire Sikhs who, in contrast to the aforementioned Muslim actors and authors, are unwilling to change their names. But Manto’s praise of the Sikh community lends itself to interpretation as farcical. He begins by praising Sardar Kharak Singh.15 Sardar, of course, is a term of respect given to Sikhs in Urdu, but it is also a trope that marks the subject of an Urdu joke. Manto tells us that it has been a long time since Kharak [lit., crash, boom, bang] Singh, now in his 80s, has ‘kharak-ed’ [cracked, boomed]. Still, (Manto continues the pun) one must applaud the fact that the idea to change his kharkhar-ing [creaking; rattling] name has not occurred to him. Manto then satirizes the kind of progressivism that seeks to transcend region or community as he imagines that even if Sikhs named Lahora Singh, Peshavara Singh, Pahavara Singh (all of whose names are geographically marked) became progressive poets, they would not change their names. The joke here, of course, is that one of the stated aims of the All India Progressive Writers movement, as the name implies, was to transcend regional and linguistic boundaries (Mir & Mir 2006: 1–23).

29 At the end of the essay, Manto turns his attention to singers and dancing girls. He admires their sweet and cute [halke phulke; literally, ‘light and fluffy’] names: Shamshad [boxwood tree, often a metaphor for a graceful figure]; Gulab [rose; beloved]; Nilam [sapphire]; Ilmas [diamond]; Mushtari [Jupiter]; Zuhra [Venus]. He tells us that because of their association with dancing girls and courtesan culture, these names have become the ‘forbidden tree’ in Urdu, suggesting that respectable families, though attracted to them, would not choose them as names for their daughters. Among the singers, Manto writes, one finds ‘strange and peculiar’ names, including Tamancha Jan [lit., ‘pistol dear;’ jān means ‘dear’ (but also ‘life, spirit’)]. He concludes the essay: [Tamancha Jan] has reached the utmost limit of progressivism… Just as with other goods and wares, there is also a shortage of names these days. New names are not to be found despite extensive and exhaustive search. My thought is that Tamancha Jan has blazed an entirely new trail. Such armed [musallah] names can be produced so easily: Top [cannon] Kumari; Anti-aircraft Begum; Atom ud-Din; Tank Singh; Banduq [rifle] Bano; Gola Bakhsh [cannonball-bestower]; Machine Gun Das; Double-dozer Khan; Mine Kaur... Hand-Grenade Devi… Bomber Bai; D1 Jan; D2 Bose, etc. etc. 30 Taking the aesthetics of progressivism to its logical, but absurd, conclusion, Manto suggests that the modern imagination is bound to take recourse to military culture and the vocabulary of war and weaponry. However, in these lines his critique reaches beyond the realm of naming, and engages issues of ‘newness’ in literature in general. If one aims to obscure or do away with the language of the past, one’s attention is bound

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to fall on the most powerful language of the present. In this case, that language is the terminology of war and the rhetoric of violence.

31 Past-tense references to Partition, and present-tense references to Muhammad Deen Taseer suggest that Manto wrote in ‘Some Thoughts about Names’ between 1947 and 1950. With this in mind, the final lines of ‘Some Thoughts about Names’ can arguably be read as a critique of the trajectory of language and discourse in South Asia in response to the violence of Partition. Militarization, the strictures and exclusivity of the progressive writers, and the communal intolerance in Indian cinema, though predating Partition, are symbols of the epistemic violence with which Manto’s essay grapples. As noted, Manto’s legacy in Urdu literary history is largely tied to his writing about Partition, and therefore, the presence of Partition-era thematic content is not surprising. However, as we shall see, the unique position that naming plays in Manto’s imaginative literature on Partition has not received adequate critical attention.

Naming and violence in ‘Yazid’

32 Manto revisits themes related to the rhetoric of violence, religion, and, one might say, ‘forbidden’ names in the story ‘Yazid.’ ‘Yazid’ was published in 1951 in a collection of short stories with the same name. A note in Manto’s collected works suggests that Manto finished the story on 4 October of that year (Manto 2012: 245). In the context of Urdu literature, the name Yazid immediately calls to mind Umayyad Caliph Yazid bin Muawiyah (647–683) and his involvement in the events at Karbala in 680 CE, where Yazid’s army killed the Prophet’s grandson Husain (626–680) along with Husain’s companions and most of his family. Longstanding debates exist within the Islamic world concerning the extent of Yazid’s culpability in the killing, but most traditions, regardless of sectarian affiliation, regard Yazid and his army’s actions at Karbala as an abuse of worldly political authority and affront to Islam. Yazid’s character is often the subject of critical writings that portray him as a licentious drunk (Hawting 2015).

33 The overwhelmingly predominant medium through which Urdu speakers remember Yazid is the large corpus of Urdu literature that commemorates the events at Karbala, the martyrdom of Husain, and the suffering of his family and companions. In this corpus of literature, and in the Shia community in South Asia in general, the name Yazid is detested and associated with filth and impurity.16 Though the Karbala narrative permeates multiple genres of Urdu, the genre most typically invoked in discussions of Yazid and Husain is the marsiyah [elegy]. Marsiyah poetry in Urdu is generally associated with the assemblies and rituals of that take place during the month of Muharram to commemorate Husain and his family’s suffering and death at the hands of Yazid’s army. Marsiyah narratives characterize Yazid as a usurper of Islamic political authority and the progeny of a political dynasty hostile to the Prophet’s family. Indeed, the name Yazid typically functions as a for un- Islamic and tyrannical rule, and is contrasted with the righteous Husain, whose martyrdom symbolizes the rescuing of Islam from the unrighteous.17 34 Manto’s ‘Yazid’ spans a few days in the life of Karimdad, a villager whose world was turned upside down by the violence of Partition. The name Karimdad comprises two parts: karīm (beneficent; also one of the divine names in Islam); and dād, the past participle of the Persian verb dādan (to give). Thus, Karimdad literally means ‘given by the beneficent,’ or ‘(beneficent-) God-given.’18 In addition to obvious notions of divine

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blessing, if we keep in mind Manto’s observations in ‘Some Thoughts about Names,’ then we may also imagine that Karimdad’s parents had prayed and made promises to God for a child (see above). In the opening paragraphs of the story, the narrator repeats the phrase ‘the troubles of ’47 came and went’ as if it were a refrain. The refrain resonates with Karimdad, who wishes to put Partition and its violence behind him and move on with his life. 35 Early in the story, Karimdad fulfills a longstanding desire when he marries Jinan (jīnān). Some readers interpret the name as meaning life or living.19 Indeed, a 19 th century British ethnography of names in Punjab lists it among ‘the many names turning on the roots meaning life.’ Interestingly, the same ethnography associates the name with the Muslim Dogar community in Punjab, though it also argues based on census data that the name is ‘common to Hindus and Musalmans’ (Temple 1883: 30, 49, 111). Other readers may read the name as rooted in the Arabic jinān, meaning heavens or paradise. 20 The lengthening and shortening of vowels in the Urdu-speaking world, for example, pronouncing muhī as mohī, as well as divers regional practices of nasalization are common enough to allow for some degree of ambiguity. In any case, soon after the wedding, Jinan’s laments for her deceased brother begin to irritate Karimdad, and he pleads with her to stop mourning the dead, reasoning that there will be many more who will die in his and Jinan’s lifetime. 36 Themes and images of death and loss provide counterpoint to Yazid’s central narrative, which follows Karimdad and Jinan as they prepare for the birth of their first child. Karimdad is enamored of Jinan, and tells her that she looks more beautiful now that she is pregnant. Feigning jealousy, he tells her that if she has become more beautiful for the child’s sake, he and the child will fight. Jinan is embarrassed, and covers her stomach. Playfully, Karimdad begins to refer to the child with mild curse words: chor [thief]; sūar ka baccha [son of a pig]. When Jinan takes offense, Karimadad begins to laugh, and insists on calling himself a ‘great big pig.’ 37 Karimdad is the kind of person who does not forget the past, but chooses not to mourn it. This affects Jinan, who does not feel she can mourn for her lost loved ones in front of him. But the mourning rituals of Muharram offer a chance for both to commemorate the dead in their own ways. Jinan asks Karimdad to take her to see the taʿziyah procession. Karimadad promises to take her and the ‘son of a pig’ in her stomach. At first, Jinan is upset by Karimdad’s words, but she begins to find love and tenderness in them. 38 One day, Bakhto Dai [dā’ī: midwife], while gently massaging Jinan’s stomach, tells her that India plans to cut off the water supply to the village’s farmland. Later, Jinan discusses the matter with Karimdad. Karimdad acknowledges hearing the rumors, but quickly changes the subject to the child. Jinan tells him that Bakhto Dai expects the child to be born in ten days. Karimdad begins to celebrate, but Jinan scolds him and insists that a Karbala is coming to the village. Jinan’s words point to an important implication that underlies the remainder of Manto’s story: In the Karbala narrative, we are told that Yazid’s forces refused to allow water to reach Husain’s camp, and that Husain and his family, including his small children, went for days without water. In ‘Yazid,’ this has been grafted onto the landscape of Karimdad’s world. That is, by implication, Hindustan threatens to become the army of Yazid, thereby turning Karimdad’s village into Husain’s camp.

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39 That evening, Karimdad attends a village meeting. The villagers are cursing Nehru and heatedly debating the truth of the rumors about India’s plans. One villager suggests the plan is punishment for the villagers’ sins, and encourages everyone to meet at the mosque for prayers. Others curse the Indians, calling their action vileness, turpitude, the greatest tyranny, the worst sin, and ‘Yazid-ness’ [yazīd-pan]. Just one of the villagers, Chaudhari Nathu, is preparing to cast a barrage of insults and curses on India, Karimdad stands up and tells the villagers not to curse anyone. When confronted, he explains that although it seems to him that Indians are his enemies, one should not curse or insult them. He explains that insults [gālī] are to be used only when one has no other response to give. When the villagers ask him for such a response, he refuses to speak on behalf of the entire community. Rather, he insists that responses require time, as does the process of stopping or changing the course of a river. By contrast, hurling insults and venting rage take only a minute. It is wrong, he insists, to curse at India, and it is foolish to expect mercy from one’s enemies, who have greater weapons and more resources. 40 Karimdad’s critique centers on the act of naming Hindustan as ‘enemy’ [dushman]. Once one has done so, one can only expect enmity in response. Karimdad addresses the villagers: Chaudhari, when you have called someone ‘enemy,’ then how can you complain when he wants to starve you to death? If he doesn’t starve you to death, doesn’t turn your green and grassy fields into wilderness and wasteland, then what, is he going to send you pots of pulao rice dishes and jars of sherbet? Set up parks and gardens for your amusement and pleasure? 41 The villagers are not convinced by Karimdad’s appeal or its logic, and call it prattle [bakvās]. He continues: Just stop and think for a minute. What won’t both sides do to pin each other in a fight? When a wrestler girds his loins and enters the ring, he has the right to use any move. […] So then it is also right to block the river… It is tyranny for us, but for them it is allowed. 42 Karimdad then indicates that naming an ‘other’ implicates the namer in a fixed positionality vis-à-vis the named. Here, one may think of Judith Butler’s discussion of naming, vulnerability, and the violence of interpellation:21 Why do you forget that they are not only our enemy? Are we not their enemies? If we had the choice, we, too, would have stopped their grain and water… But now that they can and are about to do so, we will have to think of some defensive move. What is the point of casting useless abuses? They aren’t going to cause rivers of milk to flow for you, Chaudhari Nathu. If he could, he would mix poison into every drop of your water. You’ll call it tyranny, you’ll call it brutality, because you do not like the method of striking. It is strange to set marriage-contract-like conditions before starting a fight… to say to them, ‘Look, don’t starve me to death, but you can destroy me all you want with a rifle, and with a rifle of such-and-such a bore at that.’ This is real nonsense. 43 After quipping at Chaudhari Nathu, Karimdad stands up and leaves the meeting.

44 Karimdad returns home to find that his child has been born. Bakhto Dai greets him with smiles and congratulations at the door. Like one of the family members of ‘Some Thoughts about Names,’ she immediately asks Karimdad to think of a good name for the child. Karimdad pauses and says, ‘Yazid… Yazid.’ He enters the home to find the child sucking its thumb beside Jinan. He looks at the child with loving, proud eyes, and

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addresses it as Yazid. Jinan lets out a faint cry, ‘… Yazid?!’ Karimdad inspects the child’s features and, satisfied, says, ‘Yes, Yazid… this is his name.’ The story ends: Jinan’s voice became weak. ‘What are you saying, Kimu…22 Yazid?’ Karimdad smiled. ‘What’s the big deal? It’s just a name, after all.’ Jinan could only say this much: ‘But whose name?’ Karimdad responded seriously: ‘It isn’t necessary that he be that same Yazid. That one, he closed off the water supply. This one will open it up.’ 45 With the invocation of Yazid, the archetypal enemy of Islam, Karimdad’s critique of enmity comes to its conclusion. In naming his son Yazid, Karimdad hopes to change the meaning of Yazid, and by extension the category of ‘enemy,’ and in so doing to alter the course of history.

46 Reading ‘Yazid’ strictly in the context of Partition literature and Partition-era politics, Alok Bhalla interprets the significance of the name Yazid as the means through which Manto challenges notions of perpetual Hindu-Muslim communal conflict, calls attention to Sunni-Shia sectarian tensions in Pakistan, and disputes ‘two-nation’ theorists who associate migration to Pakistan with the Prophet’s hijrat and Yazid with ‘Hindu kafirs.’ Bhalla’s reading is strategically aimed at refuting Manto translator Khalid Hasan’s claim that ‘Yazid’ justifies Muslim League politics (Bhalla 2012: 27). But ‘Yazid’ does not directly invoke communal Hindu-Muslim conflict. The characters in the story debate enmity between Pakistan and Hindustan, not Muslims and Hindus. The sectarian identity of the story’s characters is never specified, and, as I have argued above, Muslims in South Asia regardless of sectarian identity associate the name Yazid with injustice and usurpation, and scholars argue convincingly that the symbolic significance of Karbala, Muharram, and Yazid cannot be tied exclusively to a single religious sect or community in South Asia.23 ‘Yazid’ relies on this shared background for its aesthetic effect. Bhalla’s third point confusingly mixes two disparate events in Islamic history, and his notion that Yazid, a metonymy for the unjustified claim to Islamic authority, directly ties to ‘Hindu kafirs’ has no basis in the story. The villagers call Hindustan Yazid because Hindustan threatens to shut off the water supply and bring Karbala to their village. None of the villagers’ insults (meanness; lowliness; the greatest tyranny; the worst sin; Yazid-ness) calls attention to the religious identity of Hindustan. The words mazhab [sect], Muslim (or Musalman), Islam, Hindu, Shia, Sunni, and kafir do not appear in the story. By reading religious-sectarian and communal conflicts associated with Partition into the symbol Yazid and the story ‘Yazid,’ Bhalla unduly limits the scope and significance of both. 47 Bhalla argues that ‘Yazid’ proposes two ‘ethical strategies:’ ‘we should give up our collective fixation with religious identities;’ and ‘we must begin to regard our little rituals of marriage, childbirth, friendship or burial as acts of moral care which are sufficient for our common survival’ (Bhalla 2012: 26). The first ‘lesson’ resonates with Manto’s characterization of Karimdad as the kind of person who wants to leave the past behind and change the significance of names closely tied to religious history. Still, such characteristics do not amount to a desire to abandon religious identity altogether, and, as mentioned above, religious and sectarian identities are not explicitly discussed in the story. The second ignores the looming threat of international violence to which the story responds. Karimdad’s hope is not to alter the course of history by cherishing his love for Jinan and his newborn son, and by participating in local ritual and religious culture, but to effect far-reaching, international change by imbuing the name Yazid with new meaning.

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48 Both Bhalla and Jalil judge that ‘Yazid’ differs from Manto’s other stories. Bhalla judges that its tone contrasts with Manto’s ‘bitterly ironic and angry stories’ on Partition (Bhalla 2012: 26). Jalil judges that Yazid is ‘gentle’ and offers glimpses into ‘the pacifist in Manto.’ Jalil also judges that the story ‘makes a point about rough-hewn country folk being repositories of the wisdom distilled from the ages’ (Jalil 2008: xiv). The latter judgment is at odds with the unwise majority of villagers who incite violence by labeling Hindustan ‘enemy.’ Karimdad’s wisdom derives not from his ‘folksiness,’ but from his counter-cultural behavior: His refusal to mourn, his violation of linguistic convention, and his intervention at the village meeting, and his final, subversive act. While Karimdad and Jinan’s relationship in ‘Yazid’ is certainly marked by gentle tenderness, the story’s indictment of violence, while perhaps not the ‘shock treatment’ that literary historians typically find in Manto’s writing, is incisive and provocative.24 49 While discussing Manto’s writings on Partition, Fleming lists ‘Yazid’ among ‘secondary’ stories, and writes that it, like other ‘secondary’ stories, fails ‘to capture the real sorrows and joys engendered by Partition.’ She accuses Manto of using violence to shock his readers. She also accuses him of ignoring the diversity of popular reactions to the formation of Pakistan, including enthusiasm at the possibilities concomitant with the newly formed state mixed with the shock of deracination from one’s ancestral home and the loss of historical identity. Further, she claims that ‘Yazid’ does not ‘take us beyond the specific characters and situations with which [it deals]’ (Fleming 1985: 86). 50 Fleming’s characterization fails to recognize that the focus of ‘Yazid’ is not on the inner workings of the characters’ minds, but rather on the rhetoric of enmity and the violence of Partition- and post-Partition-era political discourse. In the marsiyah tradition, all focus remains on the bravery and suffering of Husain and the injustice and tyrannical violence of Yazid’s army. By contrast, Karimdad and Jinan’s feelings about Partition are left largely ambiguous in the story, partly due to Karimdad’s refusal to mourn and his insistence that Jinan, too, not mourn the dead. Eschewing predictable discussions of the bifurcation of South Asian political geography in terms of ‘the sorrows and joys of Partition,’ ‘Yazid’ explores feelings of confusion, ambivalence, hope, anger, and optimism, and focuses its satirical lens on the implications of naming one’s ‘other’ as ‘enemy,’ ‘Pakistan,’ and ‘Hindustan,’ and one’s loved ones as the archetypal enemy, ‘Yazid.’ In doing so, the story reaches beyond its characters, and confronts readers with the brutality of differentiation and the relationship between rhetorical and physical violence. It proposes unconventional uses of language and unconventional naming practices as forms of resistance. Karimdad’s profanity endears him to Jinan and to readers who find wisdom in his refusal to observe the conventions of propriety. Just as he breaks convention by cursing his child and calling him a thief, a son-of-a-pig, and, ultimately, by naming him Yazid, so too does he break convention and socially sanctioned practice as he calls himself a great big pig, refuses to mourn the dead or curse Hindustan and Hindustanis. Karimdad’s countercultural refusal to observe conventional naming practices leads to his refusal to name India as ‘enemy,’ and, consequently, to his refusal to implicate himself in the discourse of enmity and the violence that it engenders.

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Naming and archetypes in Zaigham’s ‘Shakuntala’

51 Like Manto’s ‘Yazid,’ Ghazal Zaigham’s Urdu vignette ‘Shakuntala’ examines how archetypal names mediate between past and present.25 Where ‘Yazid’ linked early representatives of Islamic justice and the violence of Partition, ‘Shakuntala’ connects the classical archetypes of Sanskrit romance and the lives of women in modern India. The story of Shakuntala appears in the Mahabharata and is famously told in a Sanskrit play by Kalidasa (fl. 5th c. CE). In Kalidasa’s version, Shakuntala is the child of Menaka, an (a beautiful ‘celestial ’) sent by Indra to seduce the sage Vishvamitra and thereby weaken the threat that Vishvamitra’s spiritual power posed to Indra’s authority (Johnson 2001; Lochtefeld 2002: 49; Williams 2003: 57, 251–252). Shakuntala is orphaned as a child and found by a rishi, who raises her in an ashram in a forest. The king Dushyant visits the forest on a hunting expedition. Shakuntala and he conceive a son (Bharat). Dushyant gives Shakuntala a ring and leaves the forest. Soon a curse is placed on Shakuntala that Dushyant will forget her unless he sees proof of their union. Shakuntala has the ring that Dushyant gave her as proof, but on her way to join the king at his palace, she loses it. This leads to a series of complications, but Dushyant eventually sees the ring, remembers Shakuntala, and Bharat eventually inherits his kingdom.26

52 Zaigham’s ‘Shakuntala’ appears in her collection of Urdu short stories, Ek Tukrā Dhūp Kā [A Little Piece of Sunlight]. As is the case in many of the stories in the collection, filmmaker Zaigham sets the scene as if she were writing camera cues. My translation leaves the language as it appears in the Urdu in order to preserve some of the dramatic changes in verb tense and syntactical ambiguities present in the original. 53 Zaigham’s ‘Shakuntala’ is intertextual and satirical. The opening lines evoke the setting of Kalidasa’s Shakuntala narrative, but soon Dushyant finds himself caught between the world of archetypal fantasy and modern reality. The markers of modernity, the telephone, the PA, the computer, and the use of English phrases, upset the Kalidasa-like grove setting and, consequently, Dushyant’s fantasy. The presence of English words (e.g., ‘idiot’) is therefore an important feature of the piece, and in order to preserve the switch in translation, I have italicized the English words and phrases present in the Urdu. Dushyant ultimately displaces his archetypal fantasy onto a supermodel of the same name: Shakuntala A pool full of limpid water in which golden, silver, darling little fishes were swimming about. Gently, lazily, white and pink lotuses were blooming; beads of water were sparkling like diamonds on their round green leaves. A pleasantly cool breeze was blowing. Countless strings of fragrant jasmine flowers were swaying back and forth. For a moment, Shakuntala’s reflection twinkled in the water. And with her ringing laughter, the entire forest awoke. They began dropping and floating about…. flowers made the tree branches bow. Dushyant awoke from a deep sleep. At once his sight fell upon the ring. Aray!... He was just strolling with Shakuntala. The forest breeze was with them… Where did you go? Khar-khar he dialed the PA’s (pī ay) number. ‘Can you give me Shakuntala’s phone number…?’ (Who knows how the poor thing is doing at the ashram? I completely forgot! But years passed in this fighting business.)

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‘Sir!’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Which Shakuntala’s number do you want?’ ‘What?’ ‘Sir ji… I mean, Varmala Shakuntala Varma? Sadhana Shakuntala Sisodhya? Shakuntala Chaudhary? Sagar Yaka Shakuntala Arya? Romila Shakuntala Baltiwala?’ ‘What are you going on about?’ (Shakuntala… What is your surname, my love… Just I forget.) ‘Sir, there are several numbers with this name in your computer.’ ‘Search by profession…’ ‘Sagar Yaka is a dancer…’ ‘Varmala ji, a teacher…’ ‘Romila is in a transport company…’ ‘Chaudhary is a housewife…’ ‘Sadhana is a typist…’ ‘Look, she used to live in an ashram, rishi ji’s... there was a lush green forest, very dense… even in the daytime you couldn’t see light, that’s how overgrown and green it was… I had just gone to hunt deer.’ ‘In the forest of which state, sir?’ ‘I don’t remember the name of the state…’ ‘Sir, all the forests have been cut down… Shahbaz Khan has hunted the black deer… And all the white deer have committed suicide for fear that someone might kill them.’ ‘Idiot.’ ‘Yes sir.’ ‘I see; ask 197 telephone inquiry…’ ‘Sir, it is giving me the number of top model Madhurima Shakuntalam…’ ‘Fine, just take that one…’ (This is fine…) 54 Readers of the opening lines of Zaigham’s story are invited to suppose that they are reading an Urdu prose version of the classical Shakuntala narrative, an illusion that is not broken until Dushyant dials the telephone. In Zaigham’s story, waking life interrupts Dushyant’s sleep, but not his fantasy. He confronts the reality that Shakuntala refers not only to the woman in his dreams, but also to contemporary women. Still, this fails to break his fantasy. The abrasively alliterative khar-khar emphasizes the disruptive role that the phone plays in the narrative. Indeed, the personal assistant disrupts Dushyant’s fantasy by referencing the modern nation and women’s roles in its economy. Dushyant seems impervious at first, and retains his desire for the classical Shakuntala of his dream-fantasy, until he displaces the classical fantasy onto a modern one, that is, onto a supermodel with a similar name. Read intertextually, Zaigham’s vignette suggests a provocative relationship between Shakuntala’s apsara heritage and the seductive qualities of the supermodel as opposed to the other Shakuntalas in the story.

55 By juxtaposing the classical Shakuntala with the modern Shakuntalam—that is, the idealized beloved of the Mahabharata and Kalidasa’s poem with a contemporary Indian supermodel—Zaigham invites us to consider the formative power of names to direct Dushyant’s desire and determine the object of his fantasy. On one reading, this formative power is tied to the exclusive signifier-signified relationship of the name Shakutala and the classical archetype. On this reading, the aim of Zaigham’s critique is the notion that symbolic names are inextricably tied to what they conventionally symbolize. The parallels with Manto’s ‘Yazid’ are obvious, though in Manto there is

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hope that Yazid can be resignified, whereas in Zaigham, the displacement of Dushyant’s fantasy suggests that conventional symbols and the fantasies that they engender are not so easily transformed.

Conclusion

56 Saadat Hasan Manto and Ghazal Zaigham satirically examine modern South Asian culture through the lens of names and naming. Manto’s essays on naming and inscription satirize the aesthetics of progressivism. They cast satirical light on familial naming practices; state and social suppression of creativity; and the ironies and absurdities of the relationship between signifier and signified. They also invite us to consider connections among the obfuscation of religious identity, Urdu progressive aesthetics, and post-Independence politics. ‘Yazid,’ in particular, critiques the discourse of enmity and the violence that it engenders, offering the appropriation of names and the refusal to name others as ‘enemy’ as interventional strategies.

57 As Manto and Zaigham’s writings demonstrate, names and naming are significant vehicles through which at least two modern Urdu authors engage and satirize aspects of South Asian culture and history. Manto uses names to satirize emergent exclusionary discourse among progressive Urdu authors and the Hindi/Hindu ‘purification’ of names in Indian cinema. Zaigham’s ‘Shakuntala’ satirizes literature that sustains classical gendered archetypes to suggest a link between such classical literary archetypes and modern desires for the kind of beauty represented by contemporary models. Both Manto and Zaigham disrupt traditional and contemporary attitudes about religious identity, aesthetics, modernity, and gender, and offer insight into the myriad roles that names play in Urdu literary culture.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

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Davies, C. Collin (2015) ‘Ahmad Shah Durrani’, in Encyclopaedia of Islam, Second Edition, Brill Online, URL: http://referenceworks.brillonline.com.

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Hawting, G.R (2015) ‘Yazīd (I) b. Muʿāwiya’, in Encyclopaedia of Islam, Second Edition, Brill Online, URL: http://referenceworks.brillonline.com.

Hyder, Syed Akbar (2006) Reliving Karbala: Martyrdom in South Asian Memory, New York: Oxford University Press.

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Manto, Saadat Hasan (2012) ‘Kuchh Nāmon ke Bāre Men’ [‘Some Thoughts about Names’] in Kulliyāt- e Manto Jild-e Sishum [The Complete Works of Manto, Volume Six], Islamabad: Narratives, pp. 395–8.

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Matthews, D.J.; Shackle, C.; Husain, Shahrukh (1985) Urdu Literature, London: Urdu Markaz.

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Patel, Geeta (2002) Lyrical Movements, Historical Hauntings: On Gender, Colonialism, and Desire in Miraji’s Urdu Poetry, Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press.

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Quraishi, Tasnim Kausar (1991) Qateel Shifai Shakhs aur Shāʿir [Qateel Shifai: Person and Poet], Lahore: Maktabah-e ʿAaliyah.

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Sarma, Ira Valeria (2002) The Laghukathā: A Historical and Literary Analysis of a Modern Hindi Prose Genre, New York: Walter de Gruyter, Berlin.

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NOTES

1. Some published editions have included the conjunction, others have omitted it. 2. Here, Manto alludes to the poetry of Urdu poet Mir Taqi Mir (1724–1810), in which the beloved is often a young boy. 3. For more connections with Naseem Bano, see The Internet Movie Database (2015: ‘Naseem Banu’ at http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0052568/?ref_=fn_al_nm_1) 4. This section translates and discusses Manto’s ‘Kuchh Nāmon ke Bāre Men’ as it appears in his collected works (listed in the bibliography). Because I quote extensively and Manto’s essay is quite brief, I have omitted references. 5. Tavahhum is a reflexive or intensive verbal noun related to vahm (fear, paranoia; imagination, fancy; suspicion, doubt; anxiety). I have translated the term as ‘superstition’ here because it best fits the context, but reflexive senses of the aforementioned English nouns, approximated by English terms such as fancifulness, are also suggested. The second part of the compound, parastī, is used synonymously with the English suffix ‘-ism’ in Urdu. It comes from a verb meaning to admire or worship, and therefore can carry some degree of religious connotation. 6. For a detailed discussion of the aesthetics of the takhallus and ‘signature couplets’ in Persian ghazal poetry, see Losensky (1997: 239–71). 7. For an English study of N.M. Rashid’s life and poetry, and his contributions to free verse and modernist poetry in Urdu, see Pue (2014: 1–18). For an English study of Miraji’s poetry and its place in Urdu literature see Patel (2002: 3–13 and 83–167). Studies of Qateel Shifai’s work are wanting in English. For Urdu, see Quraishi (1991). 8. [nairang: magic; deception; wonder; miracle; strangeness. khayāl: thought, idea; imagination. Nairang-e Khayāl: lit. wonder of thought]. 9. Ahmad Shah Abadli or Durrani (1747–1772) was an Afghan ruler whom historians remember for his repeated military campaigns in India between 1747 and 1769. For an account of Ahmad Shah and his expeditions to India, see Davies (2015). 10. The manifesto is reproduced in Coppola (1975: 282–87).

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11. Ayesha Jalal examines the impact of this literary environment on Manto’s creativity and health (Jalal 2003: 164–86). 12. According to the Internet Movie Database, this film was released with the English title, The Devoted. See The Internet Movie Database (2015: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0156916/? ref_=nm_flmg_dr_33). 13. Dilip Kumar (b. 1922) is among the most famous actors of Bombay cinema in the 20th century. See The Internet Movie Database (2015: http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0474801). For Tajour Sultana (1926–2004), see The Internet Movie Database (2015: http://www.imdb.com/title/ tt0156916/?ref_=nm_flmg_dr_33). 14. Born Sabira Begam, Asha Posley (d. 1998) rose to stardom in the 1940s. See The Internet Movie Database (2015: http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0692695/). 15. Also known as Baba Kharak Singh (1868–1963); Sikh political leader, supporter of Gandhi, outspoken critic of the British jailed numerous times, advocate for Sikh rights and national unity He retired to Delhi in 1947 (Singh 1992: 493–94). 16. One scholar raised in a Shia home in Hyderabad, India, recalls that in his youth his cousins named a stray dog in their neighborhood as ‘Yazid.’ See Hyder (2006: 14). 17. For more on Yazid, Husain, and South Asia, see Hyder (2006: 3–12). 18. Compare with the proper name Khudadad [God-given]. 19. I interpret the name this way, as does Bhalla (2012: 29). 20. I am indebted to two friends, both ‘native’ Urdu speakers, one born and educated at Hyderabad, India, the other born and educated at Lahore, for suggesting this reading of the name. 21. Euro-American philosopher Judith Butler discusses the constitution of subjectivity by hate speech interpellation in the context of speech act theory and American media, law, and politics; see Butler (1997: 1–41). 22. Jinan calls Karimdad Kimu [kīmū], a familiar, shortened form of Karimdad, throughout the story. In Urdu, such names are variously referred to as ʿurf [lit., ‘what one is known as’], which is technical, or, colloquially, as ghar-vālā nām [lit., home-name]. 23. See Hyder (2006). 24. Urdu literary historian Salim Akhtar uses the term ‘shock treatment’ to describe early Urdu writing on ‘gender and the creative consciousness’ in general and Manto’s writing in particular. See Akhtar (2005: 453). 25. I call the piece a vignette, though it is interesting to consider that it is in fact a Laghukathā, a Hindi genre of short, typically political prose. See Sarma (2002). 26. For an English version of Kalidasa, see Johnson (2001).

ABSTRACTS

This essay examines the ways in which two modern Urdu writers, Saadat Hasan Manto (1912– 1955) and Ghazal Zaigham (b. 1964), discuss issues related to familial naming practices, religious identity, Islamic history, communalism in Indian cinema, progressivism in Urdu literature, and archetypes of gender. Translations and close readings of Manto’s essays and stories as well as Zaigham’s vignette are enriched by discussions of relevant issues in South Asian history, religion, and literary culture.

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INDEX

Keywords: Manto (Saadat Hasan), Zaigham (Ghazal), Urdu literature, South Asian culture, South Asian history, South Asian religion

AUTHOR

GREGORY MAXWELL BRUCE

University of Texas, Austin

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Naming Beyond Pointing: Singularity, Relatedness and the Foreshadowing of Death

Veena Das

1 While proper names are seen as a test case for theories of reference in much of analytical philosophy, anthropologists have been much more interested in showing if a theory of names might be generated from the actual practices around names and naming practices in different societies.1 In a discussion on proper names that has achieved canonical status in anthropology, Lévi-Strauss singled out two important aspects of naming—first, that one’s relation to one’s name lies between the two poles of immutability and stability on the one side and changeability and volatility, on the other; second, that there is a foreshadowing of death in the investment of a ghostly being in a name (Lévi-Strauss 1966). To these two aspects one might add a third, which grows from Lévi-Strauss’s contention that proper names always remain at the margins of classification. Once a name is seen as a proper name, he says, it is assigned to a level beyond which it ceases to be a matter of classification, which implies that while sometimes names can be proper names that indicate identity such as caste names, or family names that are stable, at other times, they might be condensations of events such as who one is or has become because of events as blessed as the birth of a child or as devastating as the death of a relationship. This possibility of the name as encapsulating events draws attention to the fact that over the life course a name signifies not only continuity of who one is in terms of a personal identity, but also unpredictability in one’s relation to others. New names might be added to existing ones as a complement to the singularity of being or in opposition to it. Said otherwise, names, like persons, course through lives so names, like bodies, often carry the traces of the changes that have occurred in the life of a person.

2 Lévi-Strauss based much of his discussion on names on the ethnography of Penan, a group of forest nomads living in the interior of north-western Borneo studied by Rodney Needham (1954) who noted that ‘In the general extreme simplicity of Penan culture the types of names and the usages connected with them stand out in surprising

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complexity’ (Needham 1954: 416). Penan names are distinguished between personal names, tekonyms (e.g., father of so and so) and necronyms in which a kinship relation to a deceased relative comes to replace the proper name. Needham’s account showed that individuals must necessarily move between different names over a lifetime. A child might start with a proper name till one of his ascendants dies at which time he sheds the proper name and takes on the necronym (e.g. father dead). If a sibling dies the child takes the name—sibling dead—since the necronym is not a proper name but the indication of the relationship to a deceased relative. When a child bearing a necronym of a sibling is blessed with a new sibling, she reverts back to her initial proper name. As a child grows into adulthood he or she might move to a tekonym—so-and-so’s father, so-and-so’s mother. Thus a person might pass through six or seven names before he or she marries and has children. 3 Does this discussion of Penan names provide a more general framework for understanding what is at stake for anthropologists in understanding the volatility and changeability of names? While Lévi-Strauss was interested in the structural implications of these naming practices, their movements of ascent and descent, I am intrigued by another aspect—that of proclaiming or withholding a particular name from among the multiplicity of personal names that are usually given to an individual in India. I argue that attention to these aspects of naming offers a key to understanding the lethal potential that inheres in all intimate relations. The double character of names—that they can be signs of intimacy that restricts their circulation and also signs of the aspiration to be projected outward into publicity—seems to require not one definitive description but a series of descriptions through which the significance of names and naming practices might be disclosed. As I will argue, names appear sometimes to be located in secure conventions but at other times they are thrown into the whirl of events as the subject faces the risk of losing hold over the security of his or her name. 4 In order to build my argument I take two kinds of insights—first from literary texts, especially the Rāmāyaṇa (and its vernacular versions) and the Mahābhārata—and second from my long tern ethnographic engagement with low-income residents of Delhi (see Das 2015). That anthropologists should find an intimacy with literature in their thinking is not a surprise. Marc Augé (2011) speaks of the silent conversation between anthropologists and works of fiction. Other anthropologists, especially Michael Jackson (2013) and Vincent Crapanzano (2003), have established the affinity between literature and anthropology as integral to the anthropological way of knowing. In my own work on catastrophic violence I felt that we turn to the poets to give us words when we ourselves stumble in the face of violence and suffering (Das 2007). In much of this writing, the conversation between literature and anthropology is seen as taking place in the space between fieldwork and writing, helping in the modes of interpretation, providing words when our own vocabularies fail or regarding the literary as providing a model for constructing the anthropological text. In this paper, though, I am interested in two different levels at which this conversation becomes possible—one, when we find literary and philosophical expressions in the speech of our respondents in the field and second, as we look at writers as fellow travelers whose aesthetic rendering of what is happening provides insights on how to become awakened to the world that we as anthropologists might try to disclose in our own writing. In the case of the epics in India, which are part of living traditions, my respondents often evoked such stories as a way to speak about events and about their relationships. Irawati Karve

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(2008) argued for a similar sensitivity in her pioneering analysis of the characters in the Mahābhārata. Elsewhere I have developed a more sustained argument on the modalities through which we might think of literature as enabling us to focus or to hold still certain moments that would otherwise pass us by; one might compare this with still life paintings or a close up as a cinematic moment in which the dispersed emotions might be gathered and condensed (Das 2015). I hope that the methodological risks that I take by juxtaposing significant moments in a text with insights from ethnographic vignettes will help me reveal how concepts that we use in anthropology might well be seen as growing from everyday life rather than being ‘applied’ to everyday life and that literature might help us to theorize in a different modality than that of say, axiomatic reasoning.

How can I bear my name? The lament of Bharata

5 The temporal unfolding of different contexts through which one’s life moves bring to the fore new ways of experiencing one’s own name. Think in the literary register of the well-known lament of Romeo—‘My name, dear saint, is hateful to myself, Because it is an enemy to thee.’ In this section I take up the question: when is it that a name that was proudly borne, becomes difficult to bear either because one begins to see oneself through the eyes of another who brings to the surface of consciousness an aspect of the self that was previously seen as unremarkable (in the case of Romeo, the long history of clan enmity); or because what has been proclaimed on behalf of one’s name is experienced as out of harmony with one’s own sense of the self. This existential relation to the name—that it is both mine and yet not under my control, for I might become obliged to bear the consequences of another’s actions taken on my behalf, brings out the vulnerability to the other that my name exposes me to. I argue that the events I will describe here show how my own name can make me vulnerable to the world not seen as an objective overarching reality out there but as ‘my world,’ made through modes of appropriation and unfolding of events in which I might become implicated. My first example of this kind of vulnerability and how it changes one’s experience of one’s name is taken from the well-known episode in the Ayodhyā Kāṇḍa in which the hero of the epic, Rāma, has been exiled to the forest through what the epic sees as the machinations of Kaikeyī, the youngest wife of his father, who wants the kingdom for her own son, Bharata.

6 In order to place this episode in the larger narrative context let me briefly recapitulate the main story of the Rāmāyaṇa, the original text in Sanskrit on which later versions in India and South East Asia are based. There is a vast literature on the many versions of the Rāmāyaṇa story in Sanskrit and in vernacular languages as well as the textual and performance traditions based on this story in different regions in India (see Lutgendorf 1991; Richman 1991). The simplest rendering of the main story goes as follows: 7 After a long period of childlessness, the king of Ayodhyā, Daśratha, performed a royal fire-sacrifice for the realization of his wish for the birth of a son. Through divine intervention, he was given a fruit that was shared between his three wives who then gave birth to four sons, Rāma, Lakṣmaṇa, Bharata and Shatrughṇa. As part of their initiation into adulthood, Rāma and Lakṣmaṇa were sent to the forest to get rid of the demons that were troubling the renouncers and disrupting their sacrificial fires. In the

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course of their sojourns, Rāma won the hand of the beautiful princess Sītā, daughter of the learned King Janaka of Videha. Rāma was, however, again exiled to the forest for 14 years through the plotting of the youngest queen, Kaikeyī as we saw, who wanted the kingdom for her son, Bharata. His brother, Lakṣmaṇa and his wife, Sītā, accompanied Rāma in his exile to the forest. King Daśratha died of at this unbearable turn of events. Bharata was inconsolable when he learnt what his mother had done, and that too under the presumption that he would acquiesce in her plan. Refusing to accept the status of king, he ruled Ayodhyā for fourteen years as the ‘servant’ of Rāma rather than its ruler. Another grievous event happened during the second exile. Rāvaṇa, the demon king of Lankā, abducted Sītā. Following this event, Rāma gathered an army of monkeys and bears to search for her. The allies attacked Lankā, killed Rāvaṇa, and rescued Sitā. In order to prove her chastity, Sītā had to undergo a fire ordeal, but was vindicated by the gods and restored to her husband. After the couple’s triumphant return to Ayodhyā, Rāma’s righteous rule (Rāma-rājya) was inaugurated but soon after (depending on the version of the text one is reading), Sītā was exiled again because of rumors about her chastity. Given refuge in the āśrama of the sage Vālmiki, the author of the original Rāmāyaṇa, she gave birth to two sons. Though Rāma was ready to take her back after her second ordeal by fire, she refused to return to Ayodhyā, choosing to be swallowed by her mother, the earth from which she had been born, rather than accepting the ignominy of living with rumors about her chastity. In the Rāmacaritamānasa, the vernacular rendering of this story that we shall be considering, the episode of the second exile is expunged on the ground that it was a shadow Sītā who was abducted by Rāvaṇa—an interesting narrative device for making a shift in the story more consonant with the feeling that Sītā’s chastity was never in doubt.2 8 I have analyzed the narrative structure of the text, including the various coda elsewhere (see Das 1982). Here I will focus on some iconic moments in the text that portray Bharata’s lament on hearing of his mother’s ignoble actions and the verbal devices used (especially that of swearing), by which he is exonerated from any hint of complicity with Kaikeyī through the words of Rāma and his mother Kauśalyā. As we shall see, a swirl of imaginaries around names emerges in these verses, providing a rich provocation to think of the relation between name and vulnerability. 9 Let us, then, go in our imagination to the palace in Ayodhyā where Bharata and Shatrughṇa the two younger princes have been summoned to return from their sojourn in Bharata’s maternal uncle’s kingdom. They know nothing yet of the misfortunes that have befallen Ayodhyā—the exile of Rāma, Lakṣmaṇa and Sītā to the forest through the devious acts (as the text sees it) of Kaikeyī and the death of their father, Daśaratha. Kaikeyī had assumed that Bharata would be pleased at the ascension to the position of king for in her own eyes she had acted for his benefit—yet to her dismay Bharata fell into a rage on hearing what she had done, accusing her of the worst possible sin committed not only against Daśaratha and Rāma but against Bharata himself. 10 Here is how Kaikeyī announces what she has been able to do in Bharata’s absence when he makes the usual polite inquiries about everyone’s well-being: tāt bāat main sakal samvārī bhai mantharā sahāy bechārī kachuk kāja vidhi bīca bigāḍeu bhūpati surpati pur pagu dhāreu ( Ayodhyā Kāṇda, Verse 149/1)

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11 Tāt (lit. grandfather or little father, an affectionate way of addressing a child), I have taken care of all with the help of Mantharā—though fate spoiled some things—the lord of the earth (i.e. the king) left for the abode of gods.

12 Kaikeyī reveals the full extent of the story in which she had been counselled by Mantharā (her maid) to ask the king to honor an earlier vow that he would fulfill any two wishes she asked for. After Kaikeyī had ensured that Daśratha took an oath on the name of Rāma that he would not renege on his promise, she demanded that Rāma be exiled to the forest for fourteen years and Bharata be crowned as king. Bharata is stunned at this treachery that has led to the exile of his elder brother and the infamy that awaits him now of conspiring against his own brother for the love of a kingdom. He lashes out at Kaikeyī, calling her a sinful woman and asking that if she had such hatred toward him, why had she not killed him at the moment of his birth so that he would not have had to carry the ignominy of coming to be known as Rāma’s enemy. 13 Among the many passages on Bharata’s lament, let us take the following two: Hansbansu Daśaratha janaku Rāma Lakhan se Bhāi Jananī tu jananī bhai vidhi san kahu nā basāi (Ayodhyā Kāṇda, Verse 161) I was born in the lineage of the sun, Daśaratha is my father, brothers as (great as) Rāma and Lakṣmaṇa, Yet, you (lowly) woman, became my mother—who can argue with fate? And now take the following verse. Kaikeyī sujhan jogaj jag joi, catur viraci dīna mohi sokandī Daśaratha tanay Rāma laghu bhaī, dīna mohī vidhi baḍi baḍai (Ayodhyā Kānḍa, Verse 180/1) 14 Freely translated it reads as follows: That Kaikeyī who has become defamed in the world And clever fate has assigned me to that very person I am the son of Daśaratha and the younger brother of Rāma But fate has done me such a great favor (by making Kaikeyī my mother). 15 There are other powerful verses in which Bharata laments as to why Kaikeyī was born in the world, if she had to be born, why was she not infertile (bānjh) and if she were to have a son, why was that son Bharata?

16 In an earlier paper on these episodes (Das 1982), I argued that the violent rejection of the mother here is part of the story of fathers and sons—the mother is the conduit through which sons come to be attached to their father’s lineages, but once a son’s place is fully secured in the patrilineage, the mother is expected to efface herself. Bharata’s rage against his mother is not only on grounds of abstract moral principles (for she had held Daśaratha to a moral contract they had made and hence had, strictly speaking, committed no offence), but rather because she had broken the unspoken understanding of how mothers must efface themselves from the unbroken connections between fathers and sons. Bharata’s rage, however, is not related only to the public blemish but also to the sense of disgust he feels at having been born of Kaikeyī, and of being expelled from the fraternity of brothers. I find the play between the proper name Bharata and the tekonyms—son of Daśaratha, younger brother of Rāma—quite fascinating. While the patronymics are embraced as badges of honor—the name Kaikeyī putra—the son of Kaikeyī becomes a source of shame. Bharata shrinks from this appellation as from something that bites him from within. This is particularly remarkable in the text since in the previous chapter, when Bharata was bidding

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farewell to his maternal uncle, King Kaikeya, he had embraced the blessings and the tekonym—son of Kaikeyī—the very connection he was to reject violently in the next section. The names thus become condensations of swirling affects of regret, lament, blame, desire and aspiration. The issue is not that of reference—how does a proper name refer, to isolate who the bearer is—but rather of reaching into the open texture of the name through which a range of affects can be condensed and presented all at once without need of further description. 17 A second aspect of the name that the text reveals is that one’s name might also make one vulnerable to another not through hate but through love. The verse I want to take here is that in which Kauśalyā, Rāma’s mother, who comes forward herself to exonerate Bharata from any suspicion of complicity with what has transpired. Bharata had gone to the forest to beg Rāma to return and take up the reigns of the kingdom and to offer to take Rāma’s place in exile. There follows an initial misunderstanding primarily on the part of Lakṣmaṇa and some others who thought that Bharata was coming to wage war against a defenseless Rāma. Their fears were assuaged by Rāma who swore on the name of his revered, lamented father and on the name of Lakṣmaṇa that he could vouch that Bharata was incapable of bearing any enmity to him. The same suspicion arose once again—this time in the mind of Janaka, the king of Mithilā and the father of Sītā and his wife Sunayanā—and was again calmed by Kauśalyā’s swearing on the name of Rāma that Bharata had not been part of the conspiracy to exile Rāma. Instead, she attributed this terrible turn of events to the machinations of fate. Kauśalyā’s words are particularly interesting here for she says, ‘Rāma śapath main kīnhī nā kāu, so kari kahūn sakhī sati bhau’ (Ayodhyā Kānḍa, Verse 282/1)—I have never sworn by Rāma but now doing that, oh friend, I speak with truthfulness (of Bharata’s devotion to Rāma). 18 Why does this cultural notion—that someone who stands in an intimate relation to another, might use the name of this intimate other to establish the truth, and elicit the faith of the listener, by taking an oath on his or her name—make one vulnerable to the other and even to the world? First of all, I suggest that what such an act of swearing does is to make the loved other into a ransom to be redeemed by the truthfulness of the utterance—for the one whose name serves as the means for asserting the truth, it is as if in being so implicated through the act of swearing, one has been forced to recognize that one is always vulnerable to the words and gestures of another. Kauśalyā proclaims that she has never sworn by the name of Rāma—she makes an exception for the sake of Bharata just as Rāma had calmed Lakṣmaṇa earlier by swearing on his name. But can she be certain that Bharata will not betray her? 19 What is the risk one takes in swearing on the name of a loved one? I suggest that the risk is that of putting a beloved person in danger. For if my words turn out not to be true, some harm would result to him or her—one has gambled on how much trust or confidence one might place in one’s ability to read the other, or even oneself. Take Kauśalyā’s utterance—she says she never swears on the name of Rāma—in other words, however confident she might be of her own intentions, she would never put Rāma at any risk of misfortune. But now in proclaiming that Bharata could never have been swayed by any love for the kingdom to betray Rāma, she has betted on Rāma, trusting that what she knows of Bharata is true. But suppose Bharata turned out to be like other brothers who deceive each other, then not only would she be betrayed but she might also have betrayed Rāma by swearing on his name. Ideally the text seems to suggest that one should never take someone one loves as the instrument for winning the faith

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of others. In a world in which we could be certain of our loves, and of our faith in the others with whom we live, we would never put another at risk through our actions—but the text seems to suggest that swearing by another is a mode of speech through which our words may, irrespective of our intentions, jeopardize the good fortune or even the lives of those we love. 20 One piece of evidence the text gives of this danger of treating the other as a ransom is found in the exchange between Kaikeyī and Daśaratha when she asks that the two boons the king had promised now be redeemed. Mantharā had advised the queen that in order to bind the king completely to his words she must get him to swear by Rāma so that he would be bound to grant her whatever she asked for. In their exchange the king says that he loves Kaikeyī so much that he is not unwilling to swear by Rāma and yet when he hears that she wants Rāma to be exiled, he realizes that he has ransomed his son to the wrong person. This imagination of the character of intimacy and uncertainty draws on the name as that aspect of the self that is in the hands of those we love and in whose hands we may find redemption or destruction. Of course when I promise to do something, swearing by my most beloved intimate other, I create trust in my words. This is why swearing must always be in the name of someone one loves—it would make no sense to swear by the name of a stranger—but it also points to our ability to put those we love at risk by our own actions thus revealing the dark potential of names. 21 The closeness of Tulsidas’s language to everyday life among the families I have followed in my work comes out in stark relief in my fieldwork notes. In the exchange between Kaikeyī and Bharata, the commentary of the poet draws on many homely analogies—for instance, that her words were like salt rubbed on a burn wound (jale par namak lagānā) or referring to the anger that Shatrughṇa felt at the sight of Mantharā using the analogy of fire having received an āhuti—the offering that causes it to burn more vigorously. These modes of speaking are, indeed, prevalent in the everyday speech of the communities I have studied. Equally prevalent is the practice of swearing or taking an oath on the name of an intimate other. I want to contrast this practice with that of taking an oath on the name of a sacred text—in which what is put at risk is not the life of one’s beloved other but one’s own reputation for truthfulness.

Swearing and the Name of the Sacred

22 Geoffrey Hughes (1991), the historian of coarse language, has established that a shift occurred in modes of swearing from the 16th century to today, so that the formal and respectful forms of swearing in the English-speaking world have given way to swearing that is close to cursing. Respectful forms of oath-taking, he says, are now seen primarily within formal institutions such as courts of law or at the inauguration to political office. Hughes offers some broad distinctions among modes of swearing. In his words, ‘We swear by, we swear that (something is so), we swear to (do something), we swear at (somebody or something), and sometimes we swear simply out of exasperation.’ (Hughes 1991: 4) He then goes on to declare that the crude history of swearing, however named, is that people used to swear by or to, but now they swear mostly at.

23 The Indian languages I work with (Hindi, Urdu, Bangla, Gujarati, Punjabi) still have to find their historian of the underworld of language; in my ethnography of the everyday, though, the spheres within which one would swear by or swear that were somewhat

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different from those in which the primary mode of swearing was that of swearing at. The latter forms of swearing slid into obscene talk and will not concern me here. 24 Similar to the scenes we see in the Rāmacaritamānasa, people used the devices of ‘swearing by’ on momentous occasions as well as in the everyday run of things. For instance, gift giving on routine visits among relatives often involved an elaborate performance of offers and refusals. A common scene was that of a younger married sister bringing an expensive gift for her brother’s children when visiting his household. Since sisters are seen as appropriate recipients of gifts but not as individuals from whom one can accept gifts, there was an inevitable performance of the sister thrusting the gift toward her nephew or niece, her brother or sister-in-law engaging in a veritable theatre of gestures of refusal; the sister then saying at some stage—tvānu meri kasam je nā kīti—lit. I bind you with my oath if you say no (to my gift). The implication is that I have put myself on the stake for this and if you refuse the gift then you have belittled my life. The exchange might end with either a reluctant acceptance, with words such as ‘one gives to sisters, one does not receive from them’ or a return gift even larger than what was given. Elsewhere, I have examined what I called the aesthetics of kinship in gift-giving (Das 2012).3 Here I want to simply point out that verbal forms such as swearing on oneself are much more common when it is a person who is subordinate who is urging an action on the part of a superior. If the person is older or more powerful in kinship hierarchy, then it would be much more common to swear on the name of a younger person. Reversals of this principle are dramatic occasions, as was the case when Rāma swore not only on the name of Lakṣmaṇa but also on the name of his lamented father. 25 Sometimes in serous family disputes or when innocence has to be established, as was the case with Bharata, one might be asked to take an oath on the name of a sacred text. One such case I witnessed was in a Muslim household in which an aunt of a young girl had made an accusation that she had seen the girl with a boy in the market place. Given the strictness of norms of purity and honor that center around the surveillance of the behavior of young women, her parents were extremely angry with her and dragged the aunt to a family assembly in which the family Quran was produced and the girl was asked to swear by the Quran that she had not been out with a boy. The girl was crying but, putting her hand on the Quran, she said ‘I swear by the Quran that I never went out with anybody.’ Even the aunt, gossip monger though she was, could not bring herself to say that the girl was lying and went away muttering that she might have been mistaken. ‘Nobody would dare to swear falsely on the Quran’—this was a common refrain heard after the event, but some older people also said that it was wrong of the parents to have settled the matter with the help of the Quran. One old woman definitely told me that she would not have ever sworn by the Quran even if she were innocent. Recall here Kauśalyā’s words that she never swears by the name of Rāma but was making an exception to salvage Bharata’s name. 26 One day in a heated discussion on whether Aurangzeb was a good ‘Indian’ among a group of friends that included Zargham Mian (a Muslim) and Ranjit Singh (a Sikh), in one of the low-income areas in my field site, the topics ranged from the imposition of the jazia tax4 on Hindus to whether Aurangzeb was the first king to have envisaged India as a nation. But then Rantjit Singh produced his own argument with the help of the letter of victory written by Guru Gobind Singh, the tenth guru of the Sikhs, to

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Aurangzeb after the battle of Chamkaur in 1704, in which he had accused Aurangzeb of being a bad Muslim for having broken an oath he had taken on the Quran. 27 I believe that Ranjit Singh was referring to the verses in which the guru says that, having promised him safe passage out of Anandgarh fort by swearing on the Quran and then attacking his forces, Aurangzeb had shown himself to have betrayed his religion.5 mārā aitbār bar n kasm-e-nīst ke eizad gavah ast yazdan yakīst (Verse 12) na katreh mārā aitbār-e bar-ost ki bakshi va dwan hameh kizb gost (Verse 13) 28 Freely translated, these verses say: I have no trust in your oaths for (you had written on a Quran) that God is one and he is our witness (and yet you broke your oath). I do not have a drop of faith in your generals who gave immunity (swearing on the Quran)—but they were telling lies.

29 The indictment of Aurangzeb as a Muslim is contained in one of the concluding verses: na dānam ki n mard paimān shikan ke daulat prast ast maan fikan 30 I did not know that you are a perjurer—a mere worshipper of wealth and one who has falsified his faith.

31 Although I cannot take this thought further here, the examples from ethnography and texts I have assembled point to important directions in which we take our understanding of names. First, that a person’s name can make him or her a hostage to precisely those who hold that name precious, since my name can be taken by another in such moments as that of swearing by me to either attest to the truth of their own words, or in proclaiming faith in a third person that might turn out to be justified or not. But that is not the end of the story, for I can also offer myself as a hostage by swearing on myself to coerce someone who cares for me to act according to my wishes rather than what he or she wants. Above all there is the standing possibility of swearing by a sacred name, which, if done with insincerity, cannot harm the sacred entity but can make me forever doomed in the eyes of some imagined eternity or at least in the eyes of history. This is the profound meaning that Ranjit Singh (my Sikh interlocutor) was so able to draw from in an argument which was otherwise in the register of simply everyday talk. 32 A final thought I want to place here is that one aspect of swearing by someone comes out in sharper relief when we consider the rules of Sanskrit grammar pertaining to the grammatical case. As Keiden (2011) makes clear, the rules on the kārakas, or cases, are premised on a distinction between the semantic content or semantic role of a verbal argument (kāraka) and the morphological form (vibhakti the particle that is attached to the word as case ending). It is then interesting to see that the person on whose name one swears is put in the karana kāraka or the instrumental case. There is an example in the Kiṣkindhā Kānḍa from Vālmīki’s Rāmāyaṇa, in which Rāma comes across the deposed monkey King Sugrīva and promises to restore his kingdom and his wife to him by defeating his brother Valī. tvaṃ hi pāṇipradānena vayasyo me ‘gnisākṣikaḥ kṛtaḥ prāṇair bahumataḥ satyenāpi śapāmy aham (Kiṣkindhā Kānḍa, Verse 8.26) 33 For us the interesting part is the phrase ‘satyenāpi śapāmy aham’—I swear by truth—for we see that the medium through which one swears is put in the instrumental case. The general rule governing the instrumental case is that what stands in a sentence for the

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most effective means through which an action is to be accomplished takes the form of the instrumental case and stands in a relation of subordination to the kartā, the grammatical agent of an action, who is defined as svatantra, or unconstrained. I believe that in the grammatical rule that prescribes the instrumental case in relation to the verb shap (oath taking, swearing) we have not only a grammatical rule but a whole philosophy of the person that our discussion of names has opened a door to.

Taking multiple names

34 That the names of gods function as adjectives, condensed descriptions of qualities or events, is a well-known feature of Hinduism and carries important implications for devotional practices (Das 2008). Thus Pārvatī and Umā both refer to the goddess being a daughter of the mountains. One of her names, Aparṇā, signifies that she performed severe austerities, refusing to eat even leaves for nourishment (a—parṇā deprived of leaves) when she performed penance to win Śiva’s love; her name Umā can also mean ‘do not’ alluding to Menakā (her mother) asking her daughter to give up the severe austerities she performed in order to get Śiva as her husband. As Satī she is the previous incarnation and the daughter of Dakṣa; as Śivānī she is the one with the Śiva element in her. Devotees will use her one hundred and eight names for meditation while Himalaya is said to have invoked her 1008 names in his prayers, each name referring to a different aspect of her being.

35 I am tempted to use here Wittgenstein’s (1968) idea of aspect dawning when he is discussing the duck-rabbit picture, for it is not as if the duck is the true picture or the rabbit is the true picture but that both are simultaneously present—yet we now see it as a duck and now as a rabbit. It is not that we mechanically oscillate between the two aspects but seeing now the duck and now the rabbit are both potentials contained in the picture. Applying this important insight from Wittgenstein to the case of the multiple names of gods and goddesses, I suggest that each name condenses the different possibilities inherent in any narrative rendering, regardless of which one is realized at any one time. There are, however, limits to this analogy since aspect dawning is strongly tied to vision—what it is to see something as something—now a rabbit, now a duck. In the case of the multiplicity of names that might come to stick to a person, we might have a different set of questions occasioned by the fact that names are primarily words not pictures (though a picture might be conjured by a name). We may ask: does naming work by fixation or by movement and metamorphosis? In the concluding comment I will return to this question from a comparative perspective. For now let us take the example of Draupadī from the Mahābhārata to illustrate how her different names come to condense the different layers of the narrative signaling the important idea that a narrative might reveal itself to be simultaneously enacted on different planes, in different spaces and in different times. 36 Recall that Draupadī is the princess who was staked in a game of dice by Yudhiṣthira, the eldest brother of the five Pāṇḍavas—the protagonists of the epic who were denied their rightful share in the kingdom by their half-brothers, the . This injustice led to a war between the two related patrilineages—but this war of total destruction also marked the move of mankind into history—or the period of kaliyuga. The difference between the two epics—the Rāmāyaṇa and the Mahābhārata—we are considering here is described by Sheldon Pollock in these terms:

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The works are, in a fundamental way, complementary. […] Both poems relate a struggle over succession to the throne, leading to a degradation of the princess and the political power she represents and (before or after that) the exile of the protagonists, war, return, and recovery of the throne. But here too the complementarities are telling. Most important is the agon itself; the Rāmāyaṇa is a tale of ‘othering,’ the enemy is non-human, even demonic, and the war takes place in an unfamiliar, far-away world; the Mahābhārata is a tale of ‘brothering’; the enemy are kinsmen—indeed, as the protagonists say, almost their own selves—and the war takes place at home. (Pollock 2007: 34) 37 In this context it is interesting to consider the various names of Draupadī—i.e. Pānchalī, Yagyasenī, and Krishnā—that occur in different places in the text.6 Draupadī the name used most frequently for her simply means, the daughter of Drupad—just as Jānakī in the Rāmāyaṇa is simply daughter of Janak. In the course of the story of the humiliation of Draupadī in the court of Kurus, the subsequent war and the avenging of her insult, we also learn that within the mythic logic of the text, Draupadī (whose other names Pā nchalī and Yagyasenī point to her dark origin) is but the instrument of the will of gods born to ensure the complete destruction of the Kurus and the Pānchālas, the two powerful Kṣatriya lineages, whose incessant warfare has made the earth tired. Her name, Pānchālī, signifies her birth in the kingdom of the Pānchāla and along with Yagyasenī refers to another story within this rich tapestry of stories. The essential elements of the story are as follows. Droṇa, a Brahmin and , a Kṣatriya and the future Pānchāla king, are childhood friends. However, a terrible enmity develops between them and Drupada is humiliated in battle by Droṇa. Burning with the fire of vengeance, he performs a fire-sacrifice with the help of two priests to ritually produce a son for him who will kill Drona and avenge his defeat. A mighty son is born from the sacrificial fire, but unintended by the sacrificers and initially unnoticed by anyone, a beautiful girl is also born from the sacrificial altar. Hence her name Yajyasenī.

38 What is the meaning of this birth, a residue of the sacrifice—a clear acknowledgement that the human king might have had one kind of purpose (wreaking vengeance on his enemy) in performing the fire sacrifice, but the gods have used that very moment for setting into motion a different kind of violence? The text tells us that as soon as she was born, a disembodied, heavenly voice announced that Krishna (another name for Draupadī referring to her dark associations and her affinity with Kali, the goddess of death and time) will accomplish the work of gods and lead the Kṣtriyas to their destruction. Indeed, the prediction comes true in the course of the great battle. Thus the names are pregnant with the future possibilities of the narrative and are an important means for the side-shadowing that Hiltebeitel (2001) sees as an essential element of storytelling in Hindu texts. 39 As Saria’s essay on name changing among the hijras (in this volume) argues, there is a subjunctive element in the hijra practices of name changing—a desire to cut themselves off from a past or from relationships that have been corroded. In the case of multiple names of characters in the epics, there are two implicit theoretical claims on what names can mean. First that our fully-realized selves are embodied in the most well- known and public name one is known by (e.g. Draupadī); second, that name hides in it other possibilities of who we could become. Unknown to herself, Draupadī is also an instrument of the gods who leads the two lineages to their destruction just as in swearing by the name of another one ends up making him or her into an instrument for one’s own projects—a feature condensed in the grammatical rule on the karaṇa kāraka— the instrumental case—discussed earlier. I find it poignant that during their exile in the

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forest when the Pāṇdavas were enjoined to remain completely anonymous for one year, Draupadī took the name of Sairandharī—female servant. In the end was she but an instrument of the will of the gods, a servant to accomplish what the others, standing outside the social, wanted of her? 40 I want to conclude this section with a brief discussion of paragraph 79 in the Philosophical Investigations, when Wittgenstein (1968) alludes to the various descriptions that can attach to a name. It is worth citing this paragraph at some length: Consider this example. If one says ‘Moses did not exist,’ this may mean various things. It may mean: the Israelites did not have a single leader when they withdrew from Egypt—or: their leader was not called Moses—or: there cannot have been anyone who accomplished all that the Bible relates of Moses—or: etc. etc. We may say, following Russell: the name ‘Moses’ can be defined by means of various descriptions. For example, as ‘the man who led the Israelites through the wilderness,’ ‘the man who lived at that time and place and was then called “Moses”,’ ‘the man who as a child was taken out of the Nile by Pharaoh’s daughter’ and so on. And according as we assume one definition or another, the proposition ‘Moses did not exist’ acquires a different sense, and so does every other proposition about Moses […] But when I make a statement about Moses,—am I always ready to substitute some one of these descriptions for ‘Moses’? […] Has the name ‘Moses’ got a fixed and unequivocal use for me in all possible cases?—Is it not the case that I have, so to speak, a whole series of props in readiness, and am ready to lean on one if another should be taken from under me and vice versa? 41 Wittgenstein goes on to observe that a name does not have a fixed meaning, but that does not distract from its usefulness any more than the usefulness of the term ‘table’ when it comes to refer to an object next to my chair that has three legs instead of four, and therefore sometimes wobbles.7 In other words, the suggestion here is that the relation between the name and the entity it refers to might vary in the context of different descriptions that we might be able to offer of that person. In Saul Kripke’s (1971, 1980) well-known formulation on rigid designators, proper names are rigid designators because names of the same objects remain true in all possible worlds. In one of his examples—say, if Hitler had never been born, Hitler would still refer—and rigidly—to something that would not exist in that possible world. But at this point it seems interesting to ask what makes it intuitively correct for us to imagine that if someone says ‘If Hitler had never been born, the world would have been a better place,’ we know that this entity that does not exist in that counterfactual world is Hitler. However, if someone says ‘I don’t believe that anyone called Moses existed because no one could have performed all those things that Moses is said to have done,’ it is possible to imagine that Moses does not refer to any particular entity in any rigid sense. What makes the difference between the fixity of one and the relatively open texture of the latter is not anything derived from logic but from our sensibilities regarding what is history, what we express when we say if only Hitler had never been born, and our astonishment, if we do not have much use for miracles, that anyone could imagine that a person by the name of Moses could have made the sea to part. The open texture of a name may be brutally curtailed when one comes under the eyes of the State, as in applying for a passport—in other contexts such as the names lovers might give to each other, the question shifts to asking what different kinds of histories of a relationship are condensed in the names that are in movement or in transformation from one to another?

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42 The multiplicity of names that I discussed in the case of Draupadī was anchored to the multiple possibilities of a narrative and the fact that any one event always contained shadows of other lives the same character might have lived (Hiltebeitel 2001). Who it is who knows who you are might be recast in terms of questions about which names stick, when do they become rigid, and who has the right to use what name for you? These questions eventually lead one to the issue that the multiplicity of names, or multiple descriptions of a name, raise—viz., whether one is the same person for different people and whether there is essentially any one person that you are.

Name, foreshadowing of death, and ghostly lives

43 In the introductory paragraphs of this paper I referred to two important aspects of naming that I took from Lévi-Strauss’s discussion of Penan names. The first was the poles of stability and immutability on the one side and changeability and mutability on the other within which names move. The second was the relation names bear to death. In the Penan case the necronym refers to a kinship tie that has come to an end. As Lévi- Strauss states the issue: The necronym contains no proper names at all and consists in the statement of kinship relation, which is that of an unnamed ‘other’s’ relation with a self equally unnamed. It can therefore be defined as an ‘other’ relation. And finally, this relation is negative since the necronym mentions it only to declare it extinct. (Lévi- Strauss 1966: 192) 44 Might we find shadows of the necronym—not necessarily in the form that naming takes in the Penan case but in other ways in which the relation between a name or the manner of our using it, might attune us to declarations of how death is encoded in the relation we bear to names.

45 I met a woman in 2012 in a village on the fringes of Delhi, in the course of a focus-group discussion on reproductive health and institutional births that I was participating in. Although she did not bring up her experiences in the focus group discussion, later, when we were having tea, she told me as an aside that she did not have any children. Then in a curious juxtaposition she said—‘main gharwale ko Munne ke , Chotti ke bapu —aise keh ke to bula nahin sakti na—name leti hun.’ Literally translated her statement says in effect that since they have no children she cannot use the usual forms of address for her husband—such as ‘Munna’s father’ or ‘Chotti’s father’ and hence used (lit. took) his name, Suresh. At first I could not understand the import of the story—and why the whispered confidence about being childless was immediately followed by the revelation of her ‘taking’ the name of her husband. I know the taboo in India that prohibits a wife from uttering the husband’s name and the fear that such an utterance shortens the life of the man. Responding to my somewhat bewildered look, she explained further. It seems she had lost all her six babies either during birth or right after. In four cases she had miscarried in the advanced stage of pregnancy and in two cases they died within a few hours of being born. The bitterness in her voice was evident—‘My husband, could make me pregnant again and again but he could not be bothered to take me to a proper doctor or to a proper hospital. His drinking was more important to him then the lives of my children. Even now his relatives taunt me—calling me banjh (a pejorative term for a woman who is infertile)—so I too wish him a bit of death everyday by taking his name.’ By the phrase ‘taking his name,’ she did not mean that she called him by his

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name (that might have been socially unacceptable) but that if she had to send a message to him through another person when he was in the street or drinking with his friends, she would say to a neighbor or to a boy who was going in that direction—‘go, tell Suresh.’ In this way, she uttered his name many times in the day and each time brought a little bit of death on him. Her revenge on the stigmatized name of banjh, with which her conjugal relatives slighted her existence as a childless woman was to wish another stigma on herself—that of becoming a widow. 46 The second case that I offer for discussion is the opposite of the first one, in which a woman could not bear to take the name of her abuser. I have discussed this case in an earlier paper (Das 2014) but juxtaposing this case with the previous one makes the dynamic relation between a name and the foreshadowing of death more complex. It also helps to show how the idea of a necronym takes us to a very important region of everyday life that might not be evident in the formal system of naming, but dawns on us in the way people use names or withhold themselves from uttering particular names. While one might be accorded a place in the social scheme of things through the public name one carries, whether one recognizes oneself in it is more than a simple matter of following rules—behind the rules lie whole histories of relationships that give everyday life its particular texture. 47 Sheela’s family is among the small number of upper-caste families in Punjabi Basti, a low-income neighborhood in West Delhi. Her natal family had escaped from the riots in Pakistan, but her father died soon after. So she grew up in her maternal uncle’s house along with her mother, two sisters, and five older cousins. She was married at an early age to a much older man, who in other circumstances would have been considered below the status of her natal family. And although she never narrated in one long story the facts of her sexual abuse as a child, little bits of her story would come out on different occasions when we were together, in such expressions as ‘Mere naal vi bure karam hoye’ (bad acts happened with me too).8 For instance, once when she was helping her eight-year-old granddaughter to change into a new dress, she became tearful and, putting her hand on her mouth as if to block speech from bursting out, said, ‘Oh god, this is how little I was when…’ She did not elaborate, but something in her past had rotated and confronted her at this moment.9 As a child Sheela was often slapped, sometimes figuratively if not actually beaten with sticks [ḍanḍe paḍte the], not by her other relatives but by her mother. This aspect, though, she recalled with a kind of cheerfulness, commenting that her mother had to beat her to signal her own status toward her relatives, who, though not well off, had taken the additional burden of dependent relatives. ‘What could she do—there was a compulsion [mazboori thi].’ Elsewhere I have described this as the aesthetics of kinship (Das 2012). 48 Though she let some expressions of her hurt escape in my presence, I never asked and she never said whether she had told the story of her abuse to anyone, including her husband. As I have described elsewhere, in matters of sexual violation, there is an agreement in families displaced by the Partition that one does not ask any explicit questions; instead one allows oneself to be marked by the knowledge that comes one’s way. Here the anthropologist’s mode of being converges into that of the others in the community. There were two occasions, though, when Sheela did tell me something. The first occurred when I told her that there was a discipline called psychoanalysis in which therapeutic interventions consisted of the ‘patient’ talking every week for an hour with the therapist, saying whatever came to her mind. She said that she wished she could

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find a guru who would understand her without her having to say anything. Then she went on to say that she could imagine ‘talking’ about those things, but she could not imagine ever saying aloud the name of the person who had violated her. ‘I cannot even say it aloud to myself. It is like I am holding something in me, tight as a fist, a coiled snake, and if that came out, the world would be thrown into chaos [duniya utthal putthal ho jayegi].’ 49 What is it about a name that holds such powers of destruction? How does Sheela’s inability to name her abuser relate to the first case of Suresh’s wife insisting on uttering his name when she could? We know that uttering some names repeatedly such as the name of a beloved god or goddess in devotional practice brings merit. In other cases married women say that the refusal to speak the name of one’s husband comes from the desire to protect and honor him and its violation as we saw in the first case, is nothing short of wishing death upon one’s husband. In Sheela’s case, however, her abuser did not stand in any normative relation to her, yet she said she feels nauseous, physically ill and in the throes of a panic if she were to pronounce her abuser’s name even silently to herself. 50 There is another register of proper names that might have a resonance with the dread that Sheela feels in uttering the name of her abuser. While it is meritorious to recite the name of any god or goddess, as I said, it is only the ritual adepts, such as diviners, who can safely get a demon to reveal its name. Does Sheela, then, place her unnamed abuser in the position of a demon—would the utterance of his name conjure him up? This explanation too falls short of capturing the kind of intensity with which Sheela described her dread of this utterance. Sheela, after all, is not talking about someone else, a third person, whether human or demon, but about herself, the first person—and one’s relation to oneself is not based on observational knowledge. As Anscombe (1981) argued in her classic essay on the first person, one does not use the word I to refer to oneself as one would use other pronouns to refer to a second or third person. Although there might be room for debate on Anscombe’s claim that the pronoun ‘I’ is non- referential under all conditions, there is, indeed, little doubt whom I mean when I use the first person. The self is not one object among others; I do not infer how I am feeling by observing myself. Yet in Sheela’s experience, there is a name embedded in her body that destroys the intimacy she has with herself. She cannot let go of this name without making the universe go topsy-turvy. She cannot bear to make that part of herself known in which this name resides as a hostile alien.

A concluding comment

51 I argued that juxtaposing some compelling ethnographic moments with literary examples, helps us to think of the varied facets through which names course through life. As in the other essays in this volume I have tried to show how the South Asian material on names and naming can be brought to bear on theoretical issues around the play between singularity and multiplicity, contingency and necessity and the person as both autonomous and an instrument of the will of the other. Perhaps the most important lesson I learnt from engagement with texts and lives is that the name can provide a window into the way in which everyday life is imbued with the dark hues of violence, betrayal, and the corrosion of relationships. And yet, names also hold the

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promise that we can bet on the trust we place in others as one important way to redeem everyday life, as the examples from the trust Rāma placed in Bharata show.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Anscombe, Elizabeth A. (1981) ‘The First Person’, in Metaphysics and the Philosophy of Mind: Collected Philosophical Papers Volume II, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, pp. 21–37.

Augé, Marc (2011) La Vie en Double: Ethnologies, Voyages, Ecriture Paris: Payot et Rivages.

Bhava-bhūti, Rama’s Last Act, translated by Sheldon Pollock, New York: Clay Sanskrit Library.

Crapanzano, Vincent (2003) Imaginative Horizons: An Essay in Literary-Philosophical Anthropology, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

Das, Veena (1982) ‘Kāma in the Scheme of Puruṣarthas: The Story of Rāma’, in T.N. Madan (ed.), Way of Life: King, Householder, Renouncer: Essays in Honour of Louis Dumont, Delhi: Motilal Banarasidas Publications, pp. 183–204.

Das, Veena (2007) Life and Words: Violence and the Descent into the Ordinary, Berkeley: University of California Press.

Das, Veena (2008) ‘If This Be Magic … Excursions into Contemporary Hindu Lives’, in Hent de Vries (ed.), Religion Beyond a Concept, New York: Fordham University Press, pp. 259–82.

Das, Veena (2012) ‘Ordinary Ethics’, in Didier Fassin (ed.), A Companion to Moral Anthropology, Malden (Massachusetts): Wiley-Blackwell, pp. 279–306.

Das, Veena (2014) ‘Action, Expression, and Everyday Life: Recounting Household Events’, in Veena Das, Michael Jackson, Arthur Kleinman & Bhrigupati Singh (eds.), The Ground Between: Anthropologists Engage Philosophy, Durham: Duke University Press, pp. 279–306.

Das, Veena (2015) ‘Fleeting Moments that Last Forever: Violence to and Against the Everyday’, Paper presented to Mahendra Humanities Center, Harvard University, Cambridge (Massachusetts): October 26.

French, Louis (2013) The Sikh Zafarnamah of Guru Gobind Singh: A Discursive Blade in the Heart of the Mughal Empire, New York: Oxford University Press.

Hiltebeitel, Alf (2001) Rethinking the Mahābhārata: A Reader’s Guide to the Education of the Dharma King, Chicago: Chicago University Press.

Hugh, Geoffrey (1991) Swearing: A Social History of Foul Language, Oaths and Profanity in English, Oxford: Blackwell.

Jackson, Michael (2013) The Other Shore: Essays on Writers and Writing, Berkeley: California University Press.

Karve, Irawati (2008 [1968]) Yuganta: The End of an Epoch, Delhi: Orient Black Swan.

Keiden, Artemig (2011) ‘The Kāraka-Vibhakti Devise as a Heuristic Tool for a Compositional History of Pāṇini’s Aṣṭādhyāyī,’ Studi Orientali: Nuova Serie, Vol. LXXXIV (1–4): 273–88.

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Kripke, Saul (1971) ‘Identity and Necessity’, in Milton Karl Munitz (ed.), Identity and ‘Individuation’, New York: New York University Press, pp. 135–64.

Kripke, Saul (1980) Naming and Necessity, Cambridge (Massachusetts): Harvard University Press.

Lévi-Strauss, Claude (1966) The Savage Mind, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Lutgendorf, Phillip (1991) The Life of a Text: Performing the Ramcaritamanas of Tulsidas, Berkeley: University of California Press.

Needham, Rodney (1954) ‘The System of Tekonyms and Death Names of the Penan’, Southwestern Journal of Anthropology, 10(4), pp. 416–31.

Pandey, R. (1976) Rāmacaritamānas kā śāstrīya adhyayan (A scholarly study of Rāmacaritmānas), Kanpur: Pustak Sansthan.

Parry, Jonathan P. (1986) ‘The Gift, the Indian Gift and the ‘Indian Gift’’ Man, 21(3), pp. 453–73.

Pollock, Sheldon (2007) ‘Introduction’, in Rama’s Last Act, New York: Clay Sanskrit Library, pp. 27– 62.

Raheja, Gloria G. (1988) The Poison in the Gift: Ritual, Prestation, and the Dominant Caste in a North Indian Village, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

Richman, Paula (1991) ‘Introduction: The Diversity of Ramayana Traditions’, in Paula Richman (ed.) The Diversity of a Narrative Tradition in South Asia, Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. 3–21.

Singh, Guru Gobind (1967 [1707]) Zafarnama, translated by Nath in Hindi as Vijaypatrika, Delhi: Akhil Bharatiya Vidyapeeth Prakashan.

Stasik, Danuta (2009) ‘Perso-Arabic lexis in the Rāmcaritmānas of Tulsīdās’, Cracow Indological Studies, Vol. XI, pp. 1–20.

Wittgenstein, Ludwig. (1968) Philosophical Investigations, translated by G.E.M. Anscombe, London: Macmillan Press.

NOTES

1. I thank the three anonymous reviewers of SAMAJ for their meticulous reading of an earlier draft and critical comments that helped enormously in improving the argument. I am also very grateful to those who commented on the paper when it was first presented at Madison in 2014 and to my fellow contributors, especially Jacob Copeman, for an exciting adventure with names. 2. Rāmacaritmānas is the magnum opus of the poet Tulsidas and was composed in 1574. It is regarded as a new telling of the inexhaustible Rāmakathā—the sacred story of Rāma. Tulsidas himself calls the language of the composition—bhāshā—lit. language, i.e. a broad term for vernacular languages. Although some authors characterized the language of the Rāmacaritmānas as Baisavari, there is a general consensus that its language is Avadhi of which Baisavari is a dialect. The text has a number of full phrases and words adapted from different languages including Persian loan words (see Pandey 1976 and Stasik 2009) 3. Although there is an impressive literature on the relation between gifts and caste or affinal status (Parry 1986; Raheja 1988), what I want to emphasize is the style of giving and refusing gifts. 4. The reference is to the following verse in the Quran: ‘Fight those who do not believe in Allah, nor in the latter day, nor do they prohibit what Allah and His Apostle have prohibited, nor follow

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the religion of truth, out of those who have been given the Book, until they pay the tax in acknowledgment of superiority and they are in a state of subjection’ [Quran 9:29]. 5. This is the only text Guru Gobind Singh wrote in Persian. I have used phonetic spellings for the Persian verses. Several translations in Hindi and Punjabi are available (see Sing 1967); and for an interesting discussion on discursive contests and claiming of spiritual authority, see French (2013). 6. The various names of Draupadī might be grouped as tekonyms—Draupadī, Drupadkanyā, etc. referring to her lineage; others are adjectival referring to several features such as her beautiful smile—Mālinī, or her youth—Nitayuvanī. The names Krishnā—the dark one and Yajyasenī—born of the sacrificial fire—have special importance because they point to the different layers in the story. 7. Marcos Motta informs me that in Zanzibar the spirit who manifests itself in ritual might treat the human body as the table! 8. I have used phonetic spellings for spoken Punjabi and Hindi. 9. See Das (2007) for the notion of rotation in Bergson’s discussion of time and how it allows a certain region of the past to become present in the telling of a story.

ABSTRACTS

This paper argues for a theory of naming beyond the philosophical concerns with proper names as the test case for theories of reference. Moving forward from anthropological concerns of naming practices as forms of convention, I argue that names in the Indian tradition participate in a wider problematic in which the name opens the person to the world as it also makes her vulnerable to the world. Taking examples from my long time ethnographic engagement with families in Delhi and juxtaposing these examples with iconic moments of naming in stories from two Indian epics, the Rāmāyaṇa and the Mahābhārata (including their vernacular versions) the paper shows that attention to how names are used alerts us to such existential questions as whether one remains the same person to oneself and to another over the course of a life time.

INDEX

Keywords: names, immutability, volatility, death, epics

AUTHOR

VEENA DAS

Department of Anthropology, John Hopkins University, Baltimore

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Reflections on a Shared Name: Taboo and Destiny in Mayong (Assam)

Sean Dowdy

AUTHOR'S NOTE

My gracious thanks to Veena Das, Jacob Copeman, Rehanna Kheshgi, Tanmoy Sharma, William Mazzarella, Marshall Sahlins, John Kelly, Giovanni da Col, Prabin Saikia, Nileshur Ingti, Dipon Kathar and family, Mukunda Kathar and family, Jadab Teron, Biren Bangthai and family, and all my kith and kin in Burha Mayong. I also am indebted to Philippe Ramirez and two anonymous reviewers for their insightful suggestions and generous comments, and to the editors at SAMAJ for their efficient coordination. The ethnographic research and analysis for this article were made possible by an IIE Graduate Fellowship, a Wenner-Gren Dissertation Fieldwork Fellowship, a research grant from the Institute for Money, Technology and Financial Inclusion (through the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation), a University of Chicago Social Sciences Divisional Grant, and a Charlotte A. Newcombe Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship (through the Woodrow Wilson Foundation). Any inaccuracies or mistakes are my own. ‘[A] single word (and only a word) can tie or untie a fate…’ Jeanne Favret-Saada (1980: 9)

Cutting the name

1 ‘W-w-w-what is his name, again?’ Mukunda Da asked me with stuttered urgency, his eyes wide and freckled by the lamplight dancing across the room.

2 It was a late winter night in Burha Mayong village. My laptop battery was dead once again, drained from a few hours without electrical current. Earlier, Mukunda Da and I

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had been passing the time watching a film, She’s so Lovely (Nick Cassavetes 1997). While doing triple-duty of viewer, translator, and cultural interpreter, I was having a difficult time explaining the film’s narrative arc. Here was a dark love story that was about as rough as a Bukowski novel in its exploration of addiction, sickness, violence, and longing. Needless to say, our conversation digressed. 3 ‘His name is Sean Penn… He is a famous actor in America.’ I tried to recount everything I knew about Sean Penn, but before I could cook up a good story worthy of the cult of celebrity, Mukunda Da leaned in and scolded me with a half-sarcastic, half-terrified riposte. 4 ‘O Sean bhaiti…you cannot speak his name. You must call him mita (friend). […] You share his name, and it is dishonorable to call him ‘Sean’; just speak ‘mita’ to him. Let’s forget it… [laughs] now pay a fine!’ 5 ‘Why?’ I asked as I rummaged through my bag to remove my digital recorder and turn it on. ‘I have never met him and he is not my friend. He is an actor in Hollywood.’ 6 ‘He is your mita and you are his… honor him (xonman di dibo). It is bad practice (beya kam) to speak his name… this rule of mita-mita… this rule of ‘cutting the name’ (nam to kati ase)… is to give honor; we do not call our mita by name. Such is forbidden (nixiddho) in Assam.’ 7 The deed was done; I broke a taboo, albeit a seemingly minor one. But it was a taboo so rare that, before then, it was hidden in plain sight. As Mukunda Da explained, individuals who share personal names are forbidden from addressing or referring to each other by name, and instead must verbally interpellate each other as mita, meaning ‘friend.’ 8 Flushed with an ethnographer’s vanity, I quickly rejoined, ‘I don’t understand…for example, if my name is Mukunda and I say to you, ‘O Mukunda, how are you?’, then why is that forbidden? What would happen if we share the same name?’ 9 Ever the moralist, Mukunda Da responded in an increasingly solemn tone, ending with a short list of obligations I have to Mr. Penn and our shared name: There is no problem if you do not recognize me (muk sini na pai je digdar na hobo), but you are my brother now, you are a man of Mayong, so you will be shamed (las lagibo)… [and] I will be frightened… [because I will then think] why does my mita speak my name? Maybe you have bad thoughts of me, maybe you want to harm me; nobody addresses his mita by name. Names are powerful, and you know what a sorcerer (bej) can do with someone’s name. The name must be honored,… protected, … [and so] you must honor your mita always.

***

10 Transgressive action leading to contemplative revelation: the trope is familiar enough. One may recall, for example, Alfred Gell’s (1979: 134–35) taboo-breaking experience among the Umeda of New Guinea. Upon cutting his finger and unconsciously sucking the blood from the wound, Gell breached a fundamental—and thus unmentionable— taboo: auto-cannibalism.1 Yet, only in light of his transgression was Gell able to articulate the structural features and congeners of Umeda selfhood that were otherwise inarticulable in ordinary, reflexive language use. As it is for the clueless ethnographer, so it is too for the Umeda hunter who ‘lapses’ into unreflective carnal action, and is in

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turn put into place by taboo—the contemplative position that restores his ego and renews him for future activity in the world.

11 In this paper, I proceed from the dialectic of transgression and containment observed by Gell to reflect on my own lapse into tabooed speech, and on name sharing in Mayong more generally.2 In what follows, I analyze the place of personal names in acts of sorcery and magic, a baptism ceremonial, and nominal modes of address in Mayong to present some first steps toward an ethnographic theory of what a shared name is and what its taboo implies for relations of conspecificity. 12 My argument is that, in Mayong, confronting a person with the same personal name is tantamount to confronting one’s own singular destiny in another body and another time. Names and persons here are meant to have a telic identity. Or better stated, Mayongians wish that names and the persons who bear them will become one and the same over a lifetime. This wish is partly normative aspiration and partly a result of the cosmological pre-determination of personal names. Thus, when a subject transgresses the taboo on shared name utterances, she bespeaks her own past or future—her own life —in a body beyond her control. For Mayongians, this presents a philosophical and moral puzzle: is the ‘self’ confronted in the ‘other’ a result of independent actions and intentions, or a shared, cosmologically determined destiny? 13 Name sharers seem to solve this puzzle in practice by following what Mukunda Da referred to as the ‘rule of mita-mita,’ or using ‘friend’ as a euphemistic term of address. This solution, however, raises another puzzle for anthropologists. If taboo containment is generally understood as a method for creating distance from threatening substances (see below), then why does correcting this taboo seem to move closer in intimacy and permissiveness to the bearer of the taboo? After all, friendship is, ostensibly, a rather intimate and flexible social bond. To attempt an answer, I propose that the name- sharing taboo clarifies what friendship actually is in Mayong. But it does so somewhat obliquely in that its transgression—addressing my name sharer by name—implies a kind of mutual destiny more closely aligned with the logics and practices of kinship. Hence taboo containment further clarifies the limits of that gray area—a bane of anthropologists—where kinship bleeds into friendship and vice versa. Ultimately, the taboo sets a boundary via negative definition: kinship is what friendship is not. 14 At least potentially so. For it is not so much that the rule of mita-mita ultimately solves the philosophical puzzle described above. Rather, it reframes it more concretely by prompting a code for action: that is my name, but that is not my body—what obligations do I have with that person, what do I enjoin and what do I cut?

***

15 This puzzle between nominal identity and bodily difference takes us to the heart of taboo theory. On one hand, as far as current anthropological and psychoanalytic theories would have it, the enforcement of taboos is a means of constituting an embodied subject—a corporeally whole, self-aware person. By creating a safe distance between a body and a symbolically threatening external object or action, taboos protect the integrity of the subject by preventing the disintegration of the body in which it necessarily must be located.3

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16 On the other hand, a sometimes explicit addendum to this theoretical closure is that taboos cease to be operative when subjects are figured transcendent—as Kant or Christian theologians might have it—i.e., disembodied, referenced in speech or name alone, and thereby distanced from the external dangers (especially other bodies) that would otherwise put the subject at risk (Valeri 2000: 113). Of course, this in turn begs an ethnographic rejoinder: whence name utterance taboos? And serious ones at that? For Mukunda Da, my verbal transgression implied a very real threat of physical harm, a fear of the unknown intentions of other bodies lurking behind a name. While it is obvious that speech is always an embodied action, the question of why a name avoidance taboo would have implications on the integrity of one’s body is worth investigating further. 17 Thus, before returning to the ethnography at hand, it is useful to clear some conceptual ground. Although a distinction between unmentionable and untouchable things might not make much difference to Mukunda Da—or matter at all when it comes to the logics and practices of Mayongian naming in general—it certainly has made a difference in anthropological theory.

The unmentionable and the untouchable

18 An irony of the subject of name avoidance taboos in anthropological theory is that they are both everywhere and nowhere. At the foundation of anthropology as a comparative social science—a science that non-anthropologists were actually interested in—name avoidance practices were a rich source of theoretical insight and debate (Benveniste 1971, Frazer 1996, Freud 1918, Haddon 1935, Wittgenstein 1993). It is only recently that name taboos have reappeared in the literature as phenomena of theoretical concern, prompting useful insights into the (meta)pragmatic efficacy of speech avoidance in general (Fleming 2011, Fleming & Lempert 2011, Lempert & Silverstein 2013, Stasch 2011). Among other things, this literature demonstrates that, as a token of the verbal taboo type, name avoidance taboos are curiously inflexible. They have an almost crushing logic of referential and performative fixity, allowing for their transgression and containment to accrue more power to the proscription itself, making it socially productive.4

19 Accordingly, it is not surprising that name avoidance taboos populate the comparative ethnographic record. But this makes it all the more ironic that their elaboration has not contributed explicitly to a general theory of taboo. Major, path-breaking works on taboo theory in the twentieth century—Lévi-Strauss (1966, 1969), Gell (1979), Douglas (1966), Leach (1964), Valeri (2000), Kristeva (1982)—all focus rather exclusively on the particularities of the untouchable rather than the unmentionable. My question here is: can we bring the particularities of the unmentionable back into a general theory of taboo, but this time with one that has embodiment as an integrative feature? 20 In anthropology, one has to go back to Frazer, for better or worse, to begin carving out an answer. Frazer’s original hypothesis as to why name utterances are widely prohibited centers on the threat of injury by magic: ‘[name taboos] originate in a reluctance to utter the real names of persons addressed or directly referred to. That reluctance is probably based on a dread of revealing the name to sorcerers, who would thereby obtain a handle for injuring the owner of a name’ (Frazer 1996: 334). Personal names, for Frazer, act as a kind of mimetic or sympathetic label, an indexical icon that

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a sorcerer can use for transmitting lethal or harmful magic in a situation where there may or may not be co-presence. We might call this, following Fleming and Lempert (2011: 7), a ‘hazard of addressivity.’ For mentioning an unmentionable name is not simply a matter of saying too much, but of ushering an addressee—an embodied subject —into existence (and, moreover, if not the inevitable death of that subject,5 then at least its vulnerability). In this sense, physical co-presence need not be direct or immanent to an interaction—or to what Goffman (1981) refers to as a ‘participation framework’—for this hazard to unfold. 21 In this light, we might also reconsider ‘untouchability’ via Freud’s (1918: 33) rather valuable insights into what taboos against ‘touching’ actually imply: As in the case of taboo the nucleus of the neurotic prohibition is the act of touching, whence we derive the name touching phobia, or délire de toucher. The prohibition extends not only to direct contact with the body but also to the figurative use of the phrase as ‘to come into contact,’ or ‘be in touch with someone or something.’ Anything that leads the thoughts to what is prohibited and thus calls forth mental contact is just as much prohibited as immediate bodily contact; this same extension is also found in taboo. 22 On one hand, Freud’s psychoanalytic argument is useful for figuring embodiment richly, as a matter of vicarious contact (even mental or spoken). On the other hand, for Freud, speaking and thinking are essentially metaphors for touching. It is ultimately bodily contact, in its promise of immediacy, that grounds taboo. I would propose, on the contrary, that we can locate embodiment as a defining feature of unmentionable taboos in the ethnographically salient ways that bodies, names, and speech are all integrative elements of a richly defined subjectivity. A good place to start—as it was with Frazer—is in sorcery and magic as an ethnographic explicans.

The depth of magic

23 Sorcery is something Mayong is, coincidentally or not, most famous for. Rumors circulate across Northeast India—and now across much of the sub-continent—of Mayong being a center of dangerous black magic, inhabited by sorcerers (bej) who can inflict harm or manipulate one’s intentions from a distance. In Assam, it is not uncommon to hear Mayong referred to jadur dex (country of magic) or bhoyonkor dex (country of fear/danger), a place where anyone could be a potential victim or practitioner of sorcery. To the point, Mayongians are quick to remark that whether or not one believes in sorcery, it nevertheless exists as a social-cum-economic reality, efficacious and easily caught up in. Indeed, throughout Assam, healing and harming through preternatural means is one of the fastest growing industries around.

24 For our purposes here, it is important to recall Mukunda Da’s lesson to me: ‘you know what a sorcerer (bej) can do with a name.’ Sorcerers in Mayong, and throughout Northeast India, use names much like they use bodily substances—hair, fingernails, saliva, etc. All are sympathetic vehicles that are especially good for directing assault sorcery (ban, lit. ‘arrows’) toward an intended victim or, alternatively, curing someone suffering from a chronic illness. The phonemes-cum-lexemes of one’s name are not innocent particulars; they are particulate bits of cosmological data that serve as a guidemap for a sorcerer who then can access and interpret parts of a person’s destiny (bhagyo) and bio-moral composition simply by reading them.6 For acts of assault sorcery, once that data is accessed it is not only an individual who becomes a victim,

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but indirectly anyone who is a conspecific in terms of shared substance, like the blood of kin, the food of feast sharers, the rice beer of the ancestors, the title of a patriclan, or the name of a name sharer. The threat of contagion (khoti) is, among other things, why Mayongians take care not to become caught up in sorcery logic and practice, and take precautions to contain and manage substances that a sorcerer—or any other precarious being—might find of use. 25 Early on in my fieldwork, I decided to consult a local sorcerer and noted astrologer, Sri Prabin Saikia, about a chronic sleeping problem I have suffered from throughout my life. During the consultation, Prabin Da only asked me three questions: first, when the sleeping problem began; second, if I would write out the letters of my entire name (in English and Assamese); and third, if I would write the date, day, and time of my birth. I began by saying that my parasomnia started when I was a young teenager, probably 12 or 13 years old. Uncertain how to properly transliterate my name phoneme by phoneme at the time, I wrote the following:

S E A N D O W D Y 09 09 09 09 09 09 09 B6 86 A8 A6 93 A6 87

26 Before I could write the details of my birth, Prabin Da looked at the phonemes of my name and remarked quite casually that I have been bothered and manipulated by an aggressive, headless bhut (ghost, spirit)—called a murkond—most of my life. He said I must have disturbed his home, a tree on the eastern side of my house, sometime in my childhood. Borrowing my sensory faculties that night, the murkond heard someone call out my name (‘tur nam to xunisile’) and became ‘stuck’ to it (‘gotike namot logai dise’). Yet, only being able to perceive the world through my minimal senses when I slept (ears, closed eyes, and nose), the murkond developed evil eye (beya soku). 7 Singlemindedly, it followed me across the world causing fits of sleeplessness and terror wherever and whenever I dozed off.

27 When the consultation was over and a remedy for removing the murkond was applied, I asked Prabin Da how he had come to know all of this from my name. Knowing a little about how names are selected in Mayong at that point (see below), I told him that my mother chose my name arbitrarily without ritual divination or astrological consultation. He said it didn’t matter, that it was built into my bhagyo. I learned that my name contains phonemes associated with general divinity (deo) and the planet/god Saturn (Xoni [Shani])—hence forces (both positive and negative) easily ‘magnetize’ (okorxon kore) to me. I was, in so many words, a vulnerable name/body. The forces I attract, and thus the parasitical bond with the murkond, were all created independently of anyone’s intentions, wishes, or potential divinations. 28 In Mayong, at least, there is some ethnographic evidence to support Frazer’s hypothesis. Not only sorcerers but hostile bhut can access a life through a revealed name. For the murkond, however, the attachment to my name was not intentional. It was only through using my body that it could actually hear my name. (Being headless, murkond have no sense of sound.) Effectively, the murkond was as much a victim of my name’s phonetic magnetism as I will always be. Here we have this almost subjectless, flatly tactile being who is only able to sense the world through my body yet doubly trapped by (1) only being able to access it when I sleep and, (2) being perpetually ‘stuck’ to my name—not by its own choice, but by forces that, although immanent in my name,

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were transcendent and stronger than either of our bodies or intentions. Unintentional magic built this bond, and intentional magic broke it. 29 This image articulates exactly what is at stake for a more general theory of taboo that can bridge the unmentionable and untouchable divide. The locus of the event is an integrative subject, of which body, speech, and name are parts of a whole and contain the whole within them. As stated before, name utterance ushers in a vulnerable, embodied subject as an unavoidable ‘hazard of addressivity.’ But there are more entailments. It also ushers in the forces that constitute that subject, and also other bodies (like the murkond or crafty sorcerers) that can put it at risk or set it straight. We could say, then, that taboo ultimately constitutes not just embodied, but cosmological subjects. 30 We would do well, then, to counter Frazer’s hypothesis by asking not just what a name and its utterance does, but what they mean in an entire cosmology of other forces, bodies, and signs. Unfortunately, what a name actually means for Frazer is only implied in his statement that a person is an ‘owner’ of a name. The assumption that names are properties (something owned and something distinguishing) is also shared by Wittgenstein whose challenge to Frazer was, characteristically, to make the connection between magic and naming taboos universally logical: ‘Why should it not be possible for a person to regard his own name as sacred? It is certainly, on the one hand, the most important instrument which is given to him, and, on the other, like a piece of jewelry hung around his neck at birth’ (Wittgenstein 1993: 126–27). 31 Sacred, instrumental, precious, emblematic, inciteful of jealousy? Of course. Names can have all these values, in Mayong and elsewhere. But I would press Wittgenstein further on his related position that ‘the depth of magic must be preserved’ (Wittgenstein 1993: 116). Magic not only ‘expresses a wish’ (Wittgenstein 1993: 126), it also acts as an access point into deep cosmological possibilities, into forces bigger and beyond ourselves—and this independent of our wishes. One of these possibilities—let’s call it a cosmologic—is that rather than a name belonging to me, I might actually ‘belong to a name.’8 32 Mayongians embrace this cosmologic of nominal precedence and mobilize it most explicitly in the ritual contexts where personal names are selected and given. Accordingly, I turn now to describe a baptismal ceremonial, or oxus, in which personal names are given in Burha Mayong village. Since it was in conversation with a Plains Karbi elder (Mukunda Da) that I first encountered the name sharing taboo, I will focus only on the oxus of this community, but I should also note that the rituals of name- giving ceremonials in Assam (and throughout Mayong) are as diverse as the surfeit of ethnic groups that enact them.

The Plains Karbi oxus and the cosmological singularity of personal names

33 For the Plains Karbi community in Burha Mayong, oxus (oxusiya nam; xusikoron) refers doubly to a given condition of impurity (suwa) and the ritual actions that transform this condition: protection, purification, and name-giving (namokoron). Infants are the predominant subject of this ceremonial (usually conducted twelve weeks after birth), but they are not the only ones who undergo it. Anyone who wishes (or is fated) to enter

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the society (i.e., to become Karbi)—due to marriage, birth, or ethnic conversion—must complete most, if not all, the rites of the oxus ceremonial. In effect, oxus accomplish something radical. As Philippe Ramirez (2013: 65) brilliantly notes, In several Northeastern cultures, ‘purification’ should be understood as ‘transformation.’ […] The forms taken by this purification evokes that of classical Hinduism, as well as the universal concerns about social pollution. Its function, however, is the opposite of Hindu purifications […] whereas Hindu purification re- establishes a limit after removing the external agent, here it enables [the foreign agent] to move into the group. The implication for childhood oxus is that the infant is like a stranger, to be incorporated into local society (raiz) through transformative rites of purification and name-giving. Oxus are thus baptismal in a rather literal sense. This will become clearer as I proceed. In what follows, I outline some ritual features for childhood oxus that sufficiently ground what I will call the ‘cosmological singularity’ of a personal name. 34 The first rite of the ceremonial involves a bit of trickery on the part of the Karbi raiz. Male elders of the patriclan begin the ritual by fashioning two child-like dolls out of straw in the family’s courtyard (see Figure 1). The dolls are fashioned to be ersatz host bodies for daini (witches, evil spirits) who would otherwise harm the child by attaching themselves to the real child’s body in its vulnerable state. While these dolls are being constructed, female elders of the patriclan prepare an elaborate display of areca nut (tamol), pan leaves, tumeric, incense, and cut cloth to drape the dolls in—a feast and presentation to entice the daini to possess the dolls instead of the child.

Figure 1.

Men of a patriclan fashion straw dolls as host bodies for daini (witches, evil spirits) who might harm the child in its pre-named state, or, worse, use the vulnerable child’s body as a host out of jealousy for wanting of a name. Daini are nameless spirits, evil in intention, and jealous in rapport. Throughout Assam—especially among the Bodo community—they are considered to be female in gender.

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35 Concurrently, the mother, father, and infant initiate are led to the edge of the forested hills at the rear boundary of the village where the fresh water streams emerge from the jungle. There, the village high priest (rongbong kathar), erects an arch (bir) made from two young bamboo stalks, and places each stalk on opposing banks of a stream (Figure 2). A small basket, also made from bamboo, is hung from the cross-section of the arch, and an egg from a hen (from the household belonging to the infant undergoing the ceremony) is placed inside of it. The mother, father, and child (held by the mother) collectively pass through the arch (bir kilut in Karbi, kath kore in Assamese) clockwise, father first and wife/child second, thus stepping in and out of the water each time. All the while, the rongbong kathar recites mantras of purification and anoints the family with basil water (tuloxi pani) from a short container of bamboo (to be used later on in the ritual) each time they cross under the arch.

Figure 2.

The current rongbong kathar, Nileshur Ingti, prepares the bir (bamboo arch) for the purifcation ritual of ‘passing through the arch.’

36 This circuit is completed, ideally, nine times—a cosmo-numerical constant in most Karbi rites. The ‘passing under the arch’ serves two purposes: (1) to remove all pollution (suwa) from the child and her parents (thus protecting the patriclan and tribe from potential transmission of inauspiciousness or dangerous substances associated with childbirth), and (2) to prepare the child for social transformation into a Karbi person.

37 A quick note: before the completion of an oxus, the child lacks jati. 9 While it is most commonly the case that a child is a reincarnated ancestor from the same patriclan, there are dozens of instances where this has not been the case. Either way, the origin of the child’s atma (‘life substance’) remains indeterminate until divination rites are

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completed to determine who this child previously was (usually one year after the oxus). In this sense, the infant initiate is rather like Georg Simmel’s (1971) ‘stranger’—in but not of the society, socially distant yet physically close. In Burha Mayong, she fits (at least temporarily) into a class that unites wives, the line of kings, uxorilocal male sorcerers, and converted Karbi—all outsiders who have come to stay, yet keep one foot in the society and one outside of it. 38 Once the circuit is complete, the rongbong kathar breaks down the bamboo arch, removes the egg from its basket, and after constructing a ritual space on the ground (a nine point mandala made of pitha guri [rice flour]), he proceeds to break the egg with a knife, ‘cutting’ it and pouring its contents over the mandala. This rite is understood as a sanctioned sacrifice: ‘cutting in the name of god’ (bhagabhanor nam loi katise). Before cutting the egg, the rongbong kathar recites a shlok, asking the egg for forgiveness. Using the intimate toi form of address, he announces ‘O little egg! Please do not take this slaughter as an injustice. You need not think of your sacrifice as death [as a life that has been ‘cut’]. God has given this sacrifice his blessing in the past so another might live now.’ He then recites the name of the household god (Hemphu in Karbi; Mahadeu in Assamese) to nullify the sinful transgression (mahapap) of egg sacrifice.10 39 A short divination rite concerning the family’s collective destiny follows, which involves the following: first, prostrating in the four cardinal directions; second, placing nine strips of tamol (areca nut) bark, nine drops of lau pani (rice beer), and nine (inauspicious and inedible) tips of pan leaf onto the rice flour mandala (and over the broken egg); and third, cutting the bamboo container used during the bir kilut rite in half lengthwise, spilling its water onto the mandala, and then rubbing the halves together before dropping them three times onto the mandala. The way the bamboo halves fall (outside or inside up, crossed, not touching, etc.) is supposed to divine the collective destiny of a patriline now that the child is becoming a part of it. 40 After these rites are completed, the rongbong kathar returns to the courtyard of the child’s house with the lau gourd (xorbong in Karbi, see Figure 3) that held the rice beer from the previous rite. From it, he bathes a red cock with ablutions of rice beer before sacrificing it to the household deity. The cock’s blood is spilled over a set of sacred objects contained in a banana leaf, and arranged around another cosmic map made of rice flour (another nine point mandala, notably with the xorbong at the zenith, holding the rice beer necessary to complete all rituals and, in turn, symbolizing the ‘containment’ of Karbi society as a whole).

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Figure 3.

Xorbong (lau gourd).

The rongbong kathar then ‘reads’ the grooves and color of the cock’s intestines to find auspicious letters (phonemes-cum-lexemes) that should compose the child’s name and determine her life course (Figure 4). The rongbong kathar refers to this act as ‘acquiring the child’s destiny’ (puwalir bhagyo to paise).

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Figure 4.

The rongbong kathar divines phonemes/lexemes for the child’s name from the grooves and color of the cock’s removed intestines.

41 Immediately following the divination, the intestines are placed before the child-like dolls, now clothed and placed on a tray with the other objects of display laid around them (tumeric, tamol, etc.). The dolls—now inhabited by the daini—are then carried by the elder women of the patriclan out to the rice fields or into the forest, beyond the village settlement. While carrying the dolls away, the women sweep the ground ahead of them and beat sticks against fences, tree trunks, and the external walls of the house, shouting at the daini: ‘Go! Eat! Away from the house!’ (Figure 5). Once the daini have been chased away, the child is then taken indoors in order to finalize what name she will receive.

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Figure 5.

With the dolls now possessed by the daini (witches, evil spirits), the women of the patriclan take them out to the rice paddy feld behind the home of the family hosting the oxus. Dogs eagerly await to feast on the cock entrails.

42 With purifications complete and protections in place, the senior chief (bor bangthai) now consults with family members about the date and time of birth, and other astrological events relating to the child’s conception, birth, development, etc. The chiefly act of choosing the right personal name is a delicate process. Most of the time, the parents have already picked out a name, but the chief can only approve if the name meets a minimal set of requirements: (1) that the name contains the phonemes divined from the shape and color of the sacrificed cock’s intestines and from other cosmic events coincidental with birth—the name has to ‘fit’ singularly in this sense because its contents (phonemes) are cosmologically pre-determined; (2) that the name has significance in either Assamese or Karbi languages—a meaning that serves as a moral model for a normative aspiration, expressing a wish that persons and names should become the same, singular thing over time (this also allows for some flexibility in arranging the pieces of a name already available); (3) that the name is not shared by any living person in the local Karbi community and in the village as a whole.11

43 This portion of the ceremonial is never taken lightly. Arguments often ensue between patrilineal members and the bor bangthai, who has the unenviable duty of balancing the multiple criteria needed to select the ‘right name.’ I recall at one oxus—for the newborn daughter of my host sister—my own mother’s name, Maureen, was proposed as a namesake for the newborn girl. But the bor bangthai immediately shot it down: ‘No English names this time! Besides, it doesn’t fit!’ After that, the child’s paternal grandmother intervened and suggested a Hindi name: Sangamitra (meaning: socially graceful, a friend who unites others). The bor bangthai and rongbong kathar agreed that the name fit the criteria, but the bor bangthai further interjected that the name must be

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pronounced in khati Oxomiya [pure Assamese] as ‘Xɔngɔmitrɔ.’ In another oxus (for the child in Figure 6), an , Tina, was suggested and agreed upon, but the bor bangthai interjected again saying that the name needed a locally meaningful suffix to match another cosmologically pre-determined phoneme (mo’). The name finally chosen was ‘Tinamoni,’ only a partial exonym. 44 Once a name is chosen, an unmarried boy from the child’s patriclan carries in a young hen anointed with a couple drops of rice beer. The boy holds the hen up to the child's head to "kiss" it, thus sanctifying membership in the patriclan through physical transmission,12 while the chief addresses the child by her newly given personal name and clanic patronym. The rongbong kathar, in turn, addresses the child by both names and then proceeds to tie a string around the child’s wrist and then one around the foot of the hen (Figure 6), mimicking a marriage rite in the sense that the child is now ‘bound’ to the patriclan and the tribe. Patrilineal men give collective toasts of rice beer and guzzle away. The child is now of a patronym and thus belongs to the house, the patriclan, and to the Karbi raiz (i.e., to a jati) as a fully transformed person. Mutual destiny is inaugurated as such. But she is also now of her personal name—of a singular destiny that is much more precarious, dependent upon individual action and intention as much as cosmological predetermination.

Figure 6.

The rongbong kathar ties a string around the wrist of a child and is proceeding to tie a string around the foot of a hen after the child’s name is given.

***

45 The entire oxus ceremonial is meant to enact a transformation in the child—from an indeterminate vessel to a person socially and cosmologically constituted through acts of cutting, binding, containing, and naming. In that the society, in all its features, has to

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be ‘opened up’ for this to happen, protective rites are followed. They prevent jealous witches and pollution (immanent to childbirth and necessary ) from coming in through the same door, so to speak. Purification, through the rite of bir kilut and sacrificial appeasement of the household deity, further enforces the protection of all socio-cosmic domains (bodies, house, patriclan, raiz, village, tribe).

46 Name-giving, then, is the ultimate moment of transformation. It transubstantiates the child in two ways. First, the address of a clanic patronym—in conjunction with the kiss of a hen anointed by rice beer, and the strings that bind the child to the hen—transmits what we might call, following Sahlins (2013), mutual being. The code of that mutuality is a collective fate (bhagyo), originally divined by the rongbong kathar after the bir kilut rite, which then flows cross-substantially through the rice beer that grounds clanic affiliation. 47 Second, the address of a personal name transmits to the child a singular destiny. Recall the rather circuitous path that the name travels along until it unites with the child’s body. For the bor bangthai, a personal name is a puzzle. The particulate pieces of the puzzle—a given collection of cosmologically charged phonemes—are already there, predetermined by impersonal forces beyond human control. But he has to arrange them syntagmatically in such a way that the paradigmatic result is a locally nonexistent name that is also a meaningful model for the child to aspire to. Exonyms are one solution (see above), but they do not always have an intuitively local meaning. Non-existing endonyms are another, but they are hard to come by as Burha Mayong’s population grows and death rates decline. 48 It is an arduous arbitration that leads to the conclusion that, being unique and so carefully chosen, personal names are ‘cosmological singularities.’ Predetermined from impersonal forces (lexemes hidden in the phonemes), the contents of a name are a priori. Being phonetically fixed, a name always retains its connection to the impersonal forces that constituted it (recall Prabin Da’s divination of forces from my own name). It is a fate one cannot escape. 49 However, this does not mean that one’s singular fate is sealed in perpetuity. Indeed, the code and substance built into personal name is entirely amenable to individual experiences and practices in real time. What one does in response to the impersonal forces immanent in a name can change the course of that singular destiny. Here we are on solid ground for the karmic theory that all lives are a combination of predestination and individual actions and intentions—and for Marcel Mauss’ (1979) insistence that names are socially grounded categories of human understanding.

***

50 This brings us back to Mukunda Da. His fear of not knowing why his mita would speak his name is, in this context, a rather practical one: not being able to control another body’s actions and intentions when the same configuration of impersonal, cosmological forces are present in each other. If his mita was gauche enough to break a taboo, then who knows what he is capable of doing; their shared name might become disgraced, a badnam so to speak (see Aditya Bharadwaj’s contribution in this volume).

51 The cosmologic here turns on implications of conspecificity. Similar to the xará (namesakes) of Southern Mozambique and Brazil (Pina-Cabral 2010), actions of name

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sharers are substantially fused; they are like kin who are co-responsible for the well- being of their shared name and thus each other. But there is a major difference in Mayong; and the difference has to do with the notion of substance name sharers share. Name sharers are indeed conspecifics, but their consubstantiality is not—or rather, should not be—the same as that of kin.

The kith and the kin, one more time: conspecificity and destiny

52 To return to the puzzle of the name-sharing taboo, we are still left with the question of why an interpellation of ‘friendship’ serves as a euphemistic substitution. To understand what an idiom of friendship means in this context, we also must reckon what kinship is.

53 Kinship and friendship are tricky to delimit in Mayong, just as they are anywhere. Even as current anthropological theory proposes that kinship is just as constructed as friendship (that is, not necessarily a given of birth and biological relatedness), there nevertheless remains a tendency to keep the two conceptually distinct (see: Bell & Coleman 1999, Desai & Killick 2010, Schneider 1980: 53, Testart 1999: 40–1). Perhaps in its most simplistic formulation: kinship = systematic, jural obligations while friendship = unsystematic, non-jural sentiment. Yet I would contend that any attempt to define kinship over-against friendship without exploring how the boundaries between the two are defined and altered in practice—in the wake of embodied, critical events (cf. Das 1997) like taboo transgression and containment—will always come up short. 54 Julian Pitt-Rivers (1973) goes to some length to illuminate an event-centric mediation of kith and kin that I encourage here, first by posing a counterpoint to Meyer Fortes’ (1969) restriction of the axiom of amity to kinship. By extending (indeed, returning) the meaning of amity to one that includes ‘friendship,’ he makes a case quite similar to Sahlins (2013): viz., birth and biology have no bearing on what kinship really is. 13 For Pitt-Rivers, friendship and kinship are both modes of amiable conspecificity worked out in practice (cf. Pitt-Rivers 1992: 232). 55 But, there are also two particular paradoxes of friendship that this amiable conspecificity reveals. The first is that though the favours of friends must be free, they must still be reciprocated if the moral status quo is to be maintained […] [moreover] the disillusioned friend who complains that his favours have not been reciprocated destroys his own reputation by implying that he expected they should be, that he gave them only out of calculation in expectation of a return […] [revealing] that the sentiment is not mutual. (Pitt-Rivers 1973: 97) The second is that moral equality is essential between unequals, for the only admissible reciprocity is in sentiments. It must be accepted that my sentiments are of the same value as yours even though I cannot demonstrate them by material equivalence. (Pitt-Rivers 1973: 98) For our purposes here, we can unite these two and state them more simply: friends are conspecifics from the perspective of mutual and reciprocal sentiment, but by the same token, this conspecificity fails in tautology because there are no grounds for measuring equivalence in sentiment. Friends are thus like the primordial beings in Aristophanes’ discourse on love who, having been cut into two by Zeus, spend their lives searching for

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the unity in their other half that they once lost. All this is another way of saying that friends do and do not have mutuality of being. 56 How, then, does this paradox play out for distinguishing kith and kin in Burha Mayong? Names of address are an excellent place to explore this paradox, since they each (1) imply different notions of substance,14 and thus different kinds of conspecificity; and (2) constitute micro-events that provide a code for normative action and obligation. Consider the following table:

Table 1: Names of address and their corresponding notions of substance in Burha Mayong

Names of Address Notion of Substance

Personal Name Impersonal Force (Cosmological Singularity)

Nickname Love (morom)

Kin Terms as Address Honor (xonman)

Title (uppathi) Fame/Recognition (xunam/bikhat)

Clanic Patronym Rice Beer (Cosmological Mutuality)

57 Let’s start with the middle three. Nicknames (moromiyal nam) are some of the most widely used forms of address, especially in co-present interaction. They express sentiment in its rawest form. In contexts of both kinship and friendship, they are given and used out of love and affection. They are usually terms for ‘beauty’ (dhunu, moina, mamunu, majoni, aitu, etc.). Although they can be used sarcastically, they most often express a sweet, relaxed, and playful sentiment, and are used so often that addressors sometimes forget what the addressee’s real name actually is.

58 Moving to the second: as with most societies throughout South Asia, one can make kin out of anyone by addressing them in the terms of kinship. In Assam, one can address a stranger as dada/kokai (elder brother), bhaiti (younger brother), baideu/bhonti (elder/ younger sister), deuta/ai (father/mother), khura (father’s brother), mama (mother’s brother), etc., depending on context and what expectations of obligation are implied. All of these kin terms of address involve a notion of substance in honor and rank. (Note that the kin terms for many seniors are also terms for divinity: deo/deu [god], ai [goddess].) While one may use them casually, each moment of address ushers in a specific way of acting with the addressee that is also specific to kinship relations. No metaphorical extension here—addressing someone as kokai means that he is one’s elder brother in terms of honor and rank, and that is how one should act with him. (The Mayong king is always referred to as deuta, for example, and he is thus a literal father for everyone.) The key point here is that addressing someone as kin is an attempt to build mutual being through honorifics or ranked relations, even if there are no prior grounds for it. 59 A title (uppathi) is essentially the surname that one writes. (To find out what a stranger’s title is, one asks ‘Ki likhe?’ [‘What do you write?’].) It is a minimal index of tribe/caste/ religious affiliation and functions most often as a means for grasping what rules to follow with guests and strangers. If a person writes ‘Hussain,’ you shouldn’t feed her

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pork. If a person writes ‘Nath,’ you shouldn’t serve him alcohol. Moreover, in Burha Mayong it is often the case that if one, for example, writes ‘Bangthai’ or ‘Kathar’—the respective terms for ‘chief’ and ‘priest’ in Karbi society—one is not necessarily indexing affiliation to a chiefly or priestly clan (kur in Karbi, phoid in Assamese). Clanic patronyms, which I will describe below, are conceptually distinct from titles. Titles that are not clanic patronyms are often given by someone else, but in either case they are a sign of fame and public recognition (xunam, bikhat), emphasizing a particular feature of a person that should be inherited by contemporaneous and future generations. For example, one of my main informants is a member of the Timung clan, and from childhood he wrote his clanic patronym as his title. However, because of the fame and recognition he accrued with the Karbi Students Union, he was given a new title—a chiefly one, ‘Bangthai’—which he then passed on to his wife, siblings, and children as a new patronym. 60 None of these three names of address (nicknames, kin terms, titles) are marked. They are the basis of the ordinary, unmarked interactional order among kith and kin. The notions of substance they entail (love, honor, fame/recognition) are all impersonal forces not specific to either domain (kinship or friendship), or to any specific person. The other two names of address in the table above, however, belong to a marked form of address known as namkari. And this is something very personal. 61 If I address someone by his personal name, I engage in an act similar to the devotional practice of reciting the name of god in Assamese neo-Vaishnavism, or Ek Xorona Nam Dhormo (‘Taking Shelter in the Name of One’). Naming calls forth the person into existence in a cosmologically singular way, much like devotees call forth each and every aspect of Krishna through his myriad names. As I demonstrated in the previous section, the notion of substance called forth in a personal name is an amalgam of impersonal forces that unite in a name that is locally non-existent and a unique moral model for a person to live up to. Friends address each other by personal name quite casually. Kin, on the other hand, tend to avoid using them, preferring nicknames instead. 62 A personal name stands in opposition to the name that indexes lineal kinship: a clanic patronym. As I point out in note 11, a title may or may not be used as a generic patronym, but among the Karbi of Burha Mayong a clanic patronym—whether used as a title or not—is something very static. It really only appears as a term of address among kin and between potential affines in contexts of marriage, when proscriptions about who can and should marry whom become salient. For example, when my host sister eloped with her future husband, clanic patronyms became a common term of address between their two families. My sister is of the ‘Ronghang’ clan and her husband is of the ‘Timung’ clan.15 Although this marriage is not taboo, in my host father’s eyes, his daughter was ‘marrying down’ in rank. At first, he was unwilling to consent to the marriage. To appease my host father, my host sister’s father-in-law brought a lau gourd (xorbong) filled with rice beer to my host parents and entreated my host father as follows: ‘Please take this, Ronghang; your daughter will be Timung.’ One could see this as a gift of peace-making between two clans teetering between friendship and enmity. But the act was more. It preserved the integrity of the clans, as well as an openness in a request for alliance and commensalism. Rice beer is, indeed, the notion of substance that a clanic patronym calls forth. It is bio-moral and references containment, surplus, and the heirloom strands of rice grain used by families for generations. It links

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ancestors in a patriclan, binding them together as one substantial being, just as it reaches out in commensal openness to potential affines (who, upon becoming actual affines, are addressed as ‘guests’ [alohi]). Rice beer thus expresses cosmological mutuality in which a particular collectivity came, comes, and will come into being.

***

63 Returning to the paradox of friendship, we can now note what kind of substances both kith and kin truck in. Nicknames are common among friends. If their relationships are really intimate but strained in rank, they might choose to use a kin term (or append a kin term to a nickname). If they are stroking their friend’s ego, they might use a title. But in using any of these they nevertheless stay in that gray area where friendship and kinship bleed into one another, where substances of love, honor, and fame circulate. Yet, friends never use clanic patronyms and kin avoid using personal names. Correspondingly, namkari carves out two tentatively discreet zones for interactional address: a zone of independent and singular beings (reserved mainly for friends) and a zone of interdependent and mutual beings (reserved mainly for kin). Thus, in this context, the paradox of friendship is disentangled—friends may indeed be conspecific in sentiment/love, honor, and recognition, but they share these substances as independent rather than mutual beings.

64 Of course, people who share personal names throw this formula out of whack. As William Mazzarella points out in his contribution to this volume, ‘the aura of singularity [in a personal name] […] depends on all the practices that protect that singularity from being called into question or undermined.’ Uttering a name sharer’s name does just that: it undermines the distinctive aura of a name, its cosmological singularity, by implying a mutual being through the sharing of impersonal forces. Containment, through proscription and the euphemistic utterance of mita, protects that aura by returning the name sharers to a zone of independent singularities. 65 Still, something is amiss here. Name sharers share names despite the fact that they can mitigate it by claiming to be friends. Their conspecificity in shared, impersonal forces does not subside. Moreover, taboo containment only reinforces this fact since it is the ground for there being a taboo in the first place.

Fate and togetherness

66 At this point we might ask: are name sharers in Mayong actually friends? As I mentioned above, there are hardly any name sharers in Burha Mayong. They do, however, exist in the Mayong kingdom as a supralocality. These name sharers, in general, do not like each other. This dislike is not expressed as enmity, but as envy and petty rivalry with entailments of casual competition, one-upmanship, and riposte—the building blocks of ‘big man’ (dangor manuh) politics throughout Northeast India. To the point, in the only reference to the name-sharing taboo I have been able to find in regional ethnographic literature—an article about Garo (Mande) naming practices in nearby Meghalaya (Hvenekilde et al. 2000)—the authors reveal a similar phenomenon of schismogenesis. They draw on oral historical narratives that interpret the origins of this taboo in pre-colonial ripostes between warriors of neighboring villages who happened to discover that they shared a name and felt the need to challenge each

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other’s mettle.16 Speculative or not, such an account emphasizes that the containing act of addressing a name sharer as ‘friend’ is not presumed to be true in both word and deed. Addressing someone as mita need not imply mutual sentiment and reciprocity in action at all, even if it does provide a code for how the relationship should be handled.

67 Here we might take further insight from the analogous phenomenon of ‘ritual friendship’ (or ‘ritual brotherhood,’ ‘fictive kinship,’ etc.), dominant in Central India and Nepal. The term used in Nepal for such relationships is miteri (Messerschmidt 1982); among the Gabada of southern Orissa, the term is moitr (Pfeffer 2001); and in Chattisgarh, phul-phulwari (Desai 2010). In this phenomenon, bonds are intentionally created—most often with people belonging to different castes or places—and both sentiment and reciprocity are actively cultivated. So much so, that ritual friends start acting as if they were siblings, and then pass that relation on to their own next of kin. 68 There is, however, an exception in this literature that is neatly apropos of our discussion. In north-west Orissa there is a phenomenon of ritual friendship called, well, mita—almost identical to the ‘rule of mita-mita’ in Mayong. 17 Although the literature does not indicate anything as strong as a taboo on shared names, the phenomenon of mita friendship in Orissa is strikingly similar enough to warrant a full description: This form of friendship is generally restricted to people having the same name by birth. People believe that there is a special link between those who share a name. However, the common name is also abandoned in favour of mita ‘friend.’ A Brahman might perform a little ritual to underline the friendship, but in other cases people regard each other as mita just because of their common name. They may also address each other as mita, with or without a ritual […][and] mita must belong to different communities. The mita friendship constitutes a relationship between equals comparable to brothers. However, unlike genealogical brothers any difference of age does not matter: there is no distinction between elder and younger brother with all its consequences (Skoda 2004: 171). 69 Here I want to extract two points from mita friendship in Orissa that help us to clarify what friendship actually is in Mayong. The first is a similarity. This is that mita inevitably belong to different communities. Given that so much work is put into preventing village-based consociates from having the same personal name in Burha Mayong, the event of discovering someone who shares your name is a contingent one that most often occurs beyond the sectors of residence and close kinship. Effectively, name sharers are socially distant strangers, brought together in coincidence. The second is a major difference. In Orissa, mita friendship is comparable to brotherhood but disregards distinctions of age and rank. But in Mayong, name sharers cannot avoid age due to the fact that a name also has a temporal unfolding, a particular fate built into it. The wish for telic identity between a name and a person, grounded in the non- aspirational fact that cosmologically pre-determined forces constitute a name, makes a name’s temporality visible in a very real way. And since my name sharer is unavoidably either my junior or senior, by ushering him into existence viva voce I also usher in what I could be or could have been.

70 Name sharers thus have something very much in common with kin. They cannot escape the fact that they are bound by something proximal and largely pre-determined, independent of their wishes. This sheer proximity of fate, in turn, creates an obligation to care for a name, and this on the sole basis of being stuck together in an ambiguous situation (cf. Das 2013). Even if Mayongian name sharers see their relationship as one of

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competition, they nevertheless acknowledge the fear that Mukunda Da spoke of. If my name sharer is doing bad things, then that may very well affect me and what I think of as my singular fate. Better to cut the name. As a consequence, if euphemistic friendship does anything, it sets a record straight: friendship is a way to escape the ties that kinship binds. Kinship is unambiguous mutual destiny; friendship is not. Addressing a name sharer as ‘friend’ ultimately might be a socially necessary act of misrecognition (Bourdieu 1980), but the taboo and its containment nevertheless mitigate the uncanny feeling that occurs when one has an occasion to say: there is my name, but there is not my body.

An untying that binds

71 Effectively, the taboo I broke wasn’t so minor after all. It boils down to the fact that my future is something I am not exclusively responsible for. Nor is it clear that my life is uniquely my own. It is, in fact, a real cosmological possibility that Sean Penn and I share something important. Calling him by name ushers a potential shared destiny into being, implying that his bad and good deeds are potentially my own and vice versa. My future might be his present and his past might be my present.

72 Ostensibly, had I ‘cut the name’ and addressed him as my friend, I would have created between us a kind of ‘close distance’ (see Mazzarella 2003: 256–57, 2006: 496). In other words, I would have also introduced a nominal, but very real and substantial, difference: even though our embodied destinies might be intertwined, I should treat him otherwise. His embodied actions and intentions are of his own lifeworld, which may be dizzyingly close to my own, but nevertheless remain independent—just distant enough. A word, a single word, thus unties a fate. 73 Still and all, this is an untying that binds together all the Seans of the world. Every time I write Sean Penn’s name in this paper, I repeat the transgression and raise the stakes. I can’t escape him; I can’t laugh him off as ‘my other brother Sean.’ Something of our mutuality forever remains in that aspects of me are unfolding in him and vice versa. For my part, it remains uncertain whether this is good fortune or bad luck.

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Wittgenstein, Ludwig (1993 [1971]) ‘Remarks on Frazer’s Golden Bough’, Rush Rhees (trans.), in James C. Klagge & Alfred Nordmann (eds.), Philosophical Occasions, 1912–1951, Indianapolis, (Indiana): Hackett, pp. 115–55.

NOTES

1. As per Gell’s analysis, his transgression revealed a connection between general food taboos and a specific taboo on eating self-killed game among the Umeda. It also brought into sharp focus the absence of a familiar repertoire of bodily techniques: ‘With opened eyes, I was enabled to see the significance of the entire absence of auto-cannibalistic habits among the adult population, the absence of such things as nail-biting, moustache-chewing, the swallowing of dried nasal mucus, etc.—practices which among ourselves vary in degree of niceness without ever attaining the status of major sins’ (Gell 1979: 135). 2. Mayong is a multi-ethnic village cluster and customary kingdom, approximately forty kilometers west of Guwahati on the southern banks of the Brahmaputra River. The ethnographic material in this article derives mainly from the village of Burha Mayong, a predominantly Karbi village on the western border of the kingdom. 3. For a thorough survey of this literature, see Valeri (2000: Chapter 2). 4. The logic of this double-sided rigidity is as follows. On one hand, as in Saul Kripke’s (1980) famous formulation, proper names are ‘rigid designators’ because the baptismal events that usher them into use necessarily fix their reference once and for all—across all subsequent moments of use in context and in all ‘possible’ (read: hypothetical or counterfactual) worlds. In one of his examples, if there is a hypothetical world where Hitler was never born, we can still imagine a baptismal speech event where someone could say ‘Hitler is the person who was never born in our world,’ and the name ‘Hitler’ would still refer inflexibly to itself (a non-existent person). On the other hand, verbal taboos evince what Fleming (2011: 151–53, passim) calls ‘rigid performativity,’ meaning that the ability for tabooed words to do things in their explicit utterance ‘does not depend upon contextual factors or ‘felicity conditions,’ like the speaker’s intentions or the appropriateness of the social context, to have its effectiveness. It requires only the occurrence of the taboo form’ (Fleming 2011: 160). For example, to report that so-and-so said ‘I now pronounce you man and wife’ does not accidentally marry anyone whereas its ceremonial utterance—a felicity condition—allows the statement to do exactly what it says. Yet, to verbally report that so-and-so said the word ‘fuck’—or to articulate it as I do here—transgresses the same taboo on uttering the ‘f-word’ as when so-and-so originally uttered it. 5. Veena Das (this issue) argues that names can foreshadow death in subdued ways. Her two examples show how this can occur through both intentional utterances and intentional silences beyond formal systems of naming. In the first example, Das’ informant describes how she intentionally breaks a name avoidance taboo by speaking the name of her deadbeat husband—in verbal interactions with others—so as ‘to wish him a bit of death everyday by taking his name’ [cf. Trawick 1992: 95 and Das 1968 on spousal name utterance taboos in South India and Bengal, respectively]. In the second example, an informant named Sheela reveals to Das that she is unable to utter the name of a man who once violated her, even silently to herself: ‘I cannot even say it aloud to myself. It is like I am holding something in me, tight as a fist, a coiled snake, and if that came out, the world would be thrown into chaos (duniya utthal putthal ho jayegi).’

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6. See Guenzi (2012) for an ethnographically informed discussion of the Indic concept of bhagya, which she felicitously translates as ‘allotted share.’ Moreover, the connection of cosmological fate to one’s personal name is not without comparative instances. Julian Pitt-Rivers describes of first names in Andalusia: ‘A person’s first name is sometimes called his gracia [grace]’ (1992: 226). Cf. the examples of nominal personhood and shield names collected in vom Bruck & Bodenhorn (2006). 7. Being headless, and thus lacking what we might call ‘cephalic personhood,’ murkond are violently jealous beings who need the mouths, eyes, ears, and noses of others to satisfy their passions. 8. This same cosmologic is what makes Iñupiat and Inuit kinship a function of name giving and name sharing rather than of parenting and birth (Sahlins 2013: 3). 9. In Northeast India this term signifies ‘ethnicity’ or ‘race’ more than ‘caste’ (see Cantlie 1984). 10. In Karbi cosmogony—as detailed in the oratorical Mosera rite—humans were born from fowl eggs. The sin of egg sacrifice, here, unfolds from a proscription against killing the congeners of one’s own tribe, and not from killing or sacrificing a living being. There is, however, some overlap here with the anti-sacrificial tenets of Assamese Vaishnavism, the rituals of which the Karbi of Burha Mayong also partake in. 11. As a testament to the senior chief’s acumen and memory: among the living in Burha Mayong, I know of only one instance of a shared name—Rupeshor Kro and Rupeshor Timung—which is an exception that proves the rule, since the latter is the junior chief (deka bangthai) and is always addressed as such and never by name. 12. Kissing here is analogous to touching (Gregory 2011), a form of transmitting positive or negative substances. In this case, the transmission is almost certainly one of positive kinship substance. First, there is the anointing of rice beer (the quintessential clanic substance). Second is the kiss itself, vicariously given by the unmarried boy from the child’s patriclan who holds the hen. Almost an inverted mirror image of the name-sharing taboo, this rite reveals the corporeal sharing and transmission of what unites kin independently of anyone’s wishes or sentiments. 13. For Sahlins (2013: 24), however, the ‘mutuality of being’ that sufficiently defines kinship need not be amiable in practice. If I read him correctly, Sahlins would hesitate lumping ‘friendship’ in with ‘kinship’—first owing to the fact that not all societies around the world have a concept of friendship, and second because ‘mutuality of being’ allows for the possibility of kin to be both friends and enemies. To rephrase satirist Robert Benchley: all friendship is relative, although all relatives are not friends. 14. By ‘substance’ here I am referring to a kind of essence (xar in Assamese), which may or may not be material. 15. To further substantiate my argument that titles are conceptually distinct from clanic patronyms, my host family uses (‘writes’) the title ‘Kathar’—referencing a priestly affiliation— while their actual clanic patronym, ‘Ronghang,’ references a kingly affiliation. I was often told that since I am now part of their family, I am of the clan of kings. The point is that clanic patronyms can be used as titles, but not all titles are clanic patronyms. 16. Meghalaya, interestingly, has its own regional fame as a place with a hyper-eclectic naming repertoire, where one finds personal names as idiomatic, singular, and referentially foreign as ‘Latrine,’ ‘Submarine,’ ‘Fiction,’ ‘Helpme,’ etc. (see: http://namasutra.blogspot.in/2014/04/mirth- in-meghalaya.html, accessed February 6, 2015). We might see this as an alternative solution to having to confront name sharers, a kind of ‘creative refusal’ (Graeber 2013) that consciously rejects the cosmological determinism of naming practices in neighboring areas like Mayong. 17. Oriya and Assamese (Oxomiya) are linguistically related, but it is uncertain what historical or cultural connection the two phenomena share. It seems that they both belong to a permutational continuum of cultural practices concerning friendship, identity, and nominal substance. Current research into historical affinities that stretch from South India, north to the Himalaya, and east

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into Burma reveal that the stark cultural differences often attributed to Northeast Indian peoples are very much a contemporary phenomenon (see Chatterjee 2013).

ABSTRACTS

This article explores the cosmological entailments of a minor verbal taboo in Mayong (Central Assam). In brief, individuals who share personal names are forbidden from addressing or referring to each other by name, and instead must interpellate each other as mita (friend). Through an analysis of names in acts of sorcery and magic, a baptism ceremonial, and nominal modes of address in Mayong, this article demonstrates how confronting a person with a shared name is tantamount to confronting one’s own singular destiny in another body and another time. Alongside an ethnographic theorization of taboo that bridges the unmentionable and untouchable divide, this article further demonstrates how the euphemistic norm of address between name sharers reframes the distinction between kinship and friendship as a matter of with whom one can and should share a mutual destiny.

INDEX

Keywords: taboo, names, naming, cosmology, conspecificity, friendship, kinship, fate, Mayong, Assam (India)

AUTHOR

SEAN DOWDY

PhD candidate, Department of Anthropology, University of Chicago

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