Papers by Dikshit Sarma Bhagabati
Thesis Eleven, 2025
The drive for recognition, I argue here, is a normative claim inherent in the many polysemic uses... more The drive for recognition, I argue here, is a normative claim inherent in the many polysemic uses of human rights around the world. By critically re-reading Axel Honneth's theory of recognition with the anthropological literature on human rights, I wish to observe how conceptions of universal dignity and personhood are present in culturally situated struggles for political participation. This is neither the vernacularisation of canonical liberal ideas nor their careless strategic deployment in local contexts. On the other hand, actors on the margins speak the idiom of human rights to produce a contingent sense of self that is nevertheless universal in its ambition. In line with Honneth, I divide the ethnographic cases I consider into the institutional spheres of love, legality and solidarity to imagine three qualitatively different praxes of recognition. It is time to move beyond the dated universalism-versus-relativism debate. By shifting the focus to recognition, I hope to design an alternative theoretical scaffolding of human rights that makes sense of why the disenfranchised still use it, wherever and whenever they do, despite its persistent failures.
Law and Critique, 2023
Although international law grants a distinct juristic personality to indigenous peoples, this sub... more Although international law grants a distinct juristic personality to indigenous peoples, this subjecthood is premised on a hierarchical reading of ethnicity and indigeneity. Through illustrations of Adivasi experiences in India, this article interrogates the prejudices of the global juridical discourse that are reproduced by the domestic jurisdiction, exposing the voyeuristic performance of legality in constructing indigenousness.
Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies, 2021
The vivid social lives of street magicians' paraphernalia narrate the conflicts that threaten the... more The vivid social lives of street magicians' paraphernalia narrate the conflicts that threaten their artform today. Here, we attend to the movements of the Maseit street magician's objects to map the incursion of globalization and state oppression into their lifeworlds in Kathputli Colony, Delhi. Street magic, until 2018, was criminalized as begging under the Bombay Prevention of Begging Act. We examine how the rule of law inflicts routine violence on the Maseit and how the magicians in turn internally sabotage the everyday framework of legality. The first part focuses on the magician's props to unpack the brutal legacy of subordination perpetuated via legal and extralegal means. The second part describes the magician's and his things' alternation between ritual and commodity forms. We then investigate the changes in the Maseit's kinship structure and gendered division of labor that taking their performance to the stage has propelled. These accounts of disenfranchisement and marginalization reveal the dystopic condition of subalternity where the Maseit's repression becomes a necessary exercise of neutralizing suspect bodies to sustain the masses' trust in law's promises of freedom and rights.
The Indian Economic and Social History Review, 2021
This essay aims to understand the role of religion in the social work of Pandita Ramabai (1858-19... more This essay aims to understand the role of religion in the social work of Pandita Ramabai (1858-1922). By focusing on a twenty-five-year period commencing with her conversion to Christianity in 1883, we argue that religion constructed a political framework for her work in Sharada Sadan and Mukti Mission. There is a lacuna in the conventional scholarship that underplays the nuances of religion in Ramabai's reform efforts, which we try to fill by conceptualising faith and religiosity as two distinct signifiers of her private and public religious presentations respectively. Drawing on her published letters, the annual reports of the Ramabai Association in America, and a number of evangelical periodicals published during her lifetime, we analyse how she explored Christianity not just as a personal faith but also as a conduit for funds. The conversion enabled her access to American supporters, concomitantly consolidating their claim over her social work. Her peculiar religious identity-a conflation of Hinduism and Christianity-provoked strong protests from the Hindu orthodoxy while leading to a fallout with the evangelists at the same time. Ramabai shaped the public portrayal of her religiosity to maximise support from American patrons, the colonial state, and liberal Indians, resisting the orthodoxy's oppositions with these material exploits. Rather than surrendering to patriarchal cynicism, she capitalised on the socio-political volatilities of colonial India to further the nascent women's movement.
Jindal Global Law Review, 2021
I have received xenophobia and ethno-majoritarianism in the same nationalist legacy that ignites ... more I have received xenophobia and ethno-majoritarianism in the same nationalist legacy that ignites solidarities for collective subversion. Here, I explore my experiential heritage of Assamese nationalism via some personal sketches, involving people I have met and grown close to in different walks of life. I employ a psychoanalytical lens to contemplate the symbolic underpinnings of sublime patriotic imageries and therapeutically express the traumatic effects of hating Bangladeshi immigrants. Each section opens with a popular song that was freshly reimagined during the 2019 anti-Citizenship Amendment Act protests. First, I argue that Bangladeshis, as signifiers of death, kill the Assamese subjectivity while staging a cause to become Assamese in the first place. Their presence represents our inability to recoup Assam’s many losses, inducing melancholic helplessness in the ethnos. Second, I illustrate how middle-class households internalise certain immigrants as domestic helps, appropriating their emotional and material labour in private to claim hegemony in public politics. Third, I demonstrate why Assam is doomed to extinguish its revolutions before they happen. Our nationalism is stuck in a pre-oedipal mess, too infantile to be anything but fearful of whatever seems like a threat to the motherland. Finally, I end on the future anterior that nurses the present with the assurance of uniting with the homeland despite all odds. That our citizenship robs immigrants of theirs, then erecting a mirror showing our own reflections as impossible citizens, is what I wish to portray here.
Subversions: A Journal of Emerging Research in Media and Cultural Studies, 2018
This paper examines intergenerational mobility among the Maseit street magicians of Kathputli Col... more This paper examines intergenerational mobility among the Maseit street magicians of Kathputli Colony, Delhi. For centuries, these magicians have nourished and practised the art of street magic, passing it on from one generation in the family to another. However, in the face of changing times—including vectors like better education, governmental apathy, competition by stage magicians, and other forms of mass entertainment—there looms a pertinent doubt if this traditional performative art would survive for even one more generation. The Maseit have globally popularised their settlement, Kathputli Colony, for its dense concentration of street performers, but it is now being demolished to give way to a skyscraper. Furthermore, going strictly by the law, their act is no more legal than beggary. (The law, colloquially known as the Bombay Beggary Act, 1959, was repealed in August 2018.) Our research embarks on an ethnographic journey to explore the dynamics of the Maseit's performance, the equation of intergenerationality in the community, and the poetics and politics of inheritance, learning, and cultural expression.
Asian Journal of Social Science, 2021
This article explores the modes of form-construction in the performative sphere of the Brokpa’s c... more This article explores the modes of form-construction in the performative sphere of the Brokpa’s cultural enactment. Anthropocenic anxieties are embedded in the territoriality of this Himalayan community’s folk art-form and the terrain constitutes a stage to host it. The participatory framework of their songs and dances reveals the social roles that shape the positionalities of the audience and the performer, signaling a free-flowing movement between these locations in the performative field. The Brokpa dancer’s identity, carved out as a racialized attraction for the tourism market, also undergoes differentiation within the community itself based on class, gender, age, and other socio-economic indices. Yet the ultimate signifier of a performing Brokpa subject is authenticated through social differences heightened by modernity, while constantly resisting the exoticized portrayals of the community. What emerges in the end is a problematization of the line between the folk and contemporary, local and global, and traditional and modern art-forms.
Journal of Indian Law and Society, 2020
Saul Kripke's anti-descriptivist theory of naming construes proper names as "rigid designators" o... more Saul Kripke's anti-descriptivist theory of naming construes proper names as "rigid designators" of the objects to which they refer. Modern iterations of the word "Constitution" generally denote a system of checks and balances on the arbitrary exercise of state power, loosely understood as constitutionalism. However, what Kripke overlooks is the idea that the rigidity of a name also derives from a surplus of meaning, as argued by Slavoj Zizek in keeping with the Lacanian tradition. Here, I attempt to show how this surplus is created and realised in the life course of the Indian Constitution. My significant argument is that the signifier Constitution need not always signify constitutionalism. Although constitutionalism bears an indelible nexus with the foundations of the Indian Constitution, it does not share a one-to-one relationship of signification with the Constitution. Through an assessment of how the word Constitution has been treated in judicial pronouncements and popular expressions, I propose to perceive it as a master signifier: a signifier that points to itself, one that quilts the field of signifiers. This prompts me to show how the Constitution is sublimated to the level of what Lacan calls, borrowing the term from Freud, das Ding-the Thing. This kernel of desire, which is nothing but emptiness, must be continuously found and re-found, albeit it can never really be achieved. Thus arises the need to proclaim the Constitution frequently as an affirmation of rights, promoter of justice or, broadly, the fabric of an imagined Indian society. In this process, the Constitution is raised to the "dignity of the Thing" through sublimation. This sublimation is predicated on silences that speak only through ideological anamorphosis: from the violence of the partition to the netherworld of the social unconscious where the promise of rights and liberties starts faltering. My aim here is to foreground the varied modalities of deciphering the Constitution, both semantic and affective. Public engagement with the Constitution, beyond and without the dictates of legal interpretation, finds meaning in ways that at once encompass and exceed modern constitutionalism.
Jindal Law and Humanities Review, 2020
Back in 1936, frustrated with the lifeless and quotidian routines of law review publications, Fre... more Back in 1936, frustrated with the lifeless and quotidian routines of law review publications, Fred Rodell declared aghast: "there are two things wrong with almost all legal writing. One is its style. The other is its content. That, I think, about covers the ground." 1 Two decades later Barthes echoed from across the Atlantic that style, as a "blind force" in writing, is situated at the cusp of temporal biographical nature and the beyond of grammatical norms where the writer's formal identity can be established. 2 Style archives the writer's personal history, acting as a metaphor for her literary preferences without even "signifying a choice". What choice does legal writing ever We write this editorial by preserving our individual voices not as an egoistic fruition of the editorial process, but to lay bare the irreconcilable yet complementing singularities of our styles, visions, and nuanced political positions. Even though the three of us might be hinting at similar issues, we hope that the different epistemological and experiential standpoints which overwrite these familiar motifs reveal the journal's wish to rethink the familiar in uncharted ways. The many circularities, repetitions, and implicit conversational allusions within this narrative derive from the aporetical logjams of the editorial process itself. Perhaps we can hope to vindicate this dispersed Editorial-but not its attendant privilege-by agreeing that it is as murky, desolate, and circumspective as the rigours of producing a journal can be. Yet, it discloses the challenges we have grappled with, and the challenges we must still forebear to realize JLHR's cherished vision. While we sign the Editorial with our names, the effort of producing this journal has been a collective enterprise. We owe an enduring debt to the Board of Advisors for their constant guidance, support, provocations and, most importantly, for acquainting us with the ramifications and possibilities which had escaped our sight. Our contributors, overwhelmed with their own challenging schedules amidst the covid-19 pandemic, continued working with us to curate this issue. We are very grateful for the individualized and dedicated collaboration provided by each of our contributors. The University Administration at OP Jindal Global University has been generous with institutional support and personal encouragement. We owe our deepest gratitude to the Vice Chancellor and Executive Dean, JGLS. The IT team at the University has invested long hours of labour to develop a brilliant website. Being quite technologically inadequate, perhaps we will never understand the full extent of their help. Finally, try as we may to read the efforts of our fellow editors in shaping this issue, we can never fully express the collective student-led initiative of JLHR in mere words of thanks. We, therefore, write this Editorial upon the limitedness of our own contributions amidst the cumulative labour that has materialized this journal. 1
Alternative Law Journal, 2021
Objects have social lives like humans and are invested with the properties of social relations. W... more Objects have social lives like humans and are invested with the properties of social relations. We restore performativity to the journeying objects of the Maseit street magicians by drawing on our ethnography with this wayfaring community from Kathputli Colony, Delhi. The shifting social incarnations of the magicians' objects threaten law's desire for semantic closure. Their truncated movements indicate how law traps the fluid history of street magic in a rigid definitional register by criminalising it as begging. By mapping these journeys, we illuminate the ways in which the Maseit make sense of their lives within the legal framework.
NUALS Law Journal, 2020
This essay tries to problematise Hindu intestate succession and inheritance by using Hegel's pers... more This essay tries to problematise Hindu intestate succession and inheritance by using Hegel's personality theory of property. In Hegel's conception, property is a prerequisite for the self-actualisation of individuals. The abstract, self-conscious person ontologically acquires a sense of being by externally manifesting its personhood in property. This forms the basis for a general right to property. Using this Hegelian framework, I will focus on the dynamics of women's personhood in Hindu personal laws, primarily in the Hindu Joint Family and the property-holding unit of the coparcenary. First, I will attempt to show how the whole kinship system is predicated upon a systemic deprivation of women's personhood. Divesting women of their personhood is a necessity to constitute them as conduits to pass property within the joint family. I then go on to trace the intuition of personhood in the organicity of the coparcenary. One's eligibility to acquire a share in the coparcenary property is based on the qualification to offer funeral oblations. This totalitises the masculine personhood in the coparcenary unit by transcendentally tracing the members' position and stature to deceased ancestors. Women's exclusion from this ritual stems from the stereotypical notion of them lacking the potency to deal with gods, thus reducing them to a subordinate plane within the coparcenary. The essay then critically examines the Hindu Succession Act, 1956 and the much-celebrated 2005 Amendment to it. By questioning the rhetoric of gender neutrality in these legislations, I attempt to underline why legislative interventions might not suffice without progressive judicial attitudes and meaningful changes in the hegemonic discourses that regulate and plunder women's personhood. The reclamation of women's personhood can be a prudent anchoring point for this movement. In this scheme of things, Hegel's framework provides the crucial link between the social and economic forces dictating what it means to be a woman and its reflection in joint-family property.
Indian Law Review, 2019
This review article charts how the obscenity law has been a shaping influence across different fo... more This review article charts how the obscenity law has been a shaping influence across different forms of media in India, especially literature and art. By taking into account the effect of Section 292 of the Indian Penal Code on the lives and careers of a few renowned creative professionals, from Manto to M.F. Husain, this article reveals the shortcomings of a moralistic approach to obscenity. Over the course of the 20 th century and the early years of the 21 st , the law has undergone notable changes, some inspired by comparative law developments around the world and some unique to the Indian context. Through a thematic arrangement of case law, this paper attempts to throw light on the Indian judiciary's quest to gauge obscenity and penalize it. The various ideologies which are brought to bear on obscenity highlight the need for an objective test in this area. Moreover, by criticising the existing legislative definitions of obscenity and its doctrinal development over time, this paper will map the trajectories towards that objective standard.
Economic and Political Weekly, 2018
Conference Presentations by Dikshit Sarma Bhagabati
The Cornell Law School Inter-University Graduate Conference, 2021
International law grants a distinct juristic personality to indigenous peoples as recipients of c... more International law grants a distinct juristic personality to indigenous peoples as recipients of cultural rights and sufferers of colonial oppression. Yet, the modes of realising this legal subjecthood are premised on a hierarchical reading of ethnicity and indigeneity. Through illustrations of Adivasi experiences in India, this article sheds light on the prejudicial terms of the global juridical discourse. Appending indigenous nationhoods to the very states responsible for their imperial enslavement disproportionately diminishes the thankless compensation for historical wrongs that various treatises and treatises evocatively aver. In the voyeuristic eyes of law, the stories of their migration are silenced and their identities fixed unchangingly to fabricate ethnic originariness. While self-identification has been accepted as the fundamental criterion of indigenous selfhood, the bureaucratic rhetoric of cultural diversity perpetuates an exoticised portrayal of the Aboriginal other. Moreover, the seductive focus on untruncated and primitive association with remote territories ignores the eclectic influence of both the local and the global—and the traditional and the modern—on indigenous lifeworlds. These misconceptions resonate profoundly with the violence-marred past of the Adivasis, echoing the dominant stereotypes about what it means to be an indigenous people.
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Papers by Dikshit Sarma Bhagabati
Conference Presentations by Dikshit Sarma Bhagabati