CHATTISGARH

Subaltern Studies emerged at the end of the 1970s among a collective of English and Indian historians of South Asia, and developed into a creative and malleable reworking of knowledge(s).  Importantly, the subalternists contributed to an interdisciplinarity that displayed a commitment to the recovery of subaltern or ‘indigenous’ histories and knowledges.  The idea of identity-based knowledge is necessarily decentred in a transnational enterprise such as Subaltern Studies, and concomitantly, geographical spaces, although relevant, are no longer central in determining power relations.  However, changes of practice, globalisation and shifting localities, and critical awareness do not make the marginalities at the heart of the apparatus of knowledge production and its global division of labour disappear altogether. As a corpus of knowledge intellectual cohesiveness has never been a main concern for Subaltern Studies and here lies its main strength for South African anthropology.  The project should be viewed as an evolving dialogue, one that privileges creative possibilities of a mutually constitutive ‘conversation’.

The Indian state of Chhattisgarh has been continually confronted with violent assaults and murder targeting individuals who are believed to practice witchcraft. By sketching the murder of accused witch, Kulwantin Bai Nishad, in 1995, I highlight the way prevailing assumptions about witchcraft, long held by the media, police and state, were contested. Intersecting with a national and state discourse of modernist ideals, witch-related violence has been transformed into a politicised object that signals extreme underdevelopment in a state whose legitimacy depends upon progress and development. The Indian Police Service (IPS), the foremost organisation to contend with these issues, maintains a crucial role in administering the citizen–state encounter. Commonly associated with attributes of corruption, misuse of authority, violence and partisan politics, the police official emerged in the findings as an ordinary citizen having a special and sometimes difficult public job. By examining a discretionary ‘practice’ at work in police dealings with witchcraft accusations, I argue that power shapes what is recognised as criminal behaviour, the significance assigned to a crime and therefore, practices of policing. This article concludes that discretionary power opens up a terrain of unpredictability and ‘formlessness’ that lends hope for citizen rights.

Macdonald, H.  2009. Handled with discretion: Shaping policing practices through witch accusations, Contributions to Indian Sociology (n.s.) 43(2): 285–315

Using the idea of hybrid scepticism, I argue that villagers are ambivalent about their healers in a way that allows for the immersion of modernist criticisms of healers, healing systems and interventionist strategies. What is important is that my informants, like the majority of persons, are not passive believers but sceptical agents with reflexive awareness of their own actions. This chapter calls for a more nuanced investigation of scepticism, an analysis of the sceptical style that does less violence to Chhattisgarhi notions of who they are.

One characteristic of violence is the unmaking of language and fracturing of the victim’s social world.  In recent theorising, narrative is posited to play an important role in restoring the victim to his/her status as a social person.  Fiona Ross (2003) has argued that it is naïve to assume the ‘speaking self equates with the healed self’.  She shows that individuals can be harmed when they lose control over their narratives circulated in the public sphere.  Using an encounter with a woman accused of witchcraft, my article traces the way her experience has been appropriated by her family and in broader spaces of engagement between villagers, police, media and finally, the anthropologist.  The article raises questions about the contexts in which there is no voice for a woman to assert her control.  Seeking to contribute to an ethical theory of risk and vulnerability, this paper suggests that closer attention should be paid to the processes of forgetting and grieving as forms of control articulated through the body.

Detail lithologic mapping and stratigraphic studies in the Singhora-Saraipali area of the southeastern part of the Chattisgarh Basin reveal that the basal part of the Chattisgarh Supergroup constitutes a thick continuous succession of conglomerate, immature sandstones and shale, which has been classified into Lohardih and Gomarda Formations. The Lohardih Formation unconformably overlies the crystalline basement. The immature successions of the Lohardih and Gomarda Formations grade upward to quartzarenites of the Kansapathar Formation. The Lohardih, Gomarda and Kansapathar Formations constitute the Chandarpur Group, which has been conformably overlain by the limestone-shale assemblage of the Raipur Group. There is no evidence of any large-scale hiatus within the Chandarpur assemblage, or within the Chandarpur-Raipur assemblage, which can be considered as a sequence-bounding unconformity. Thin pebble sheets and pebbly zones occur at different stratigraphic levels within the Lohardih-Gomarda assemblage, which are related to events of episodic progradations, and do not signify any major break in deposition. Stratigraphic evidence dictates that Singhora Group of is a lateral extension of Chandarpur Group of Patranabis-Deb and Chaudhuri (2008). The succession evolved through several coarsening-up and fining-up cycles. The sediments were deposited in fan-fan delta, prodelta, tide-storm dominated prograding shelf, high-energy coastal and tidal flat environments. It has been inferred that the immature lower part of the succession developed during the active rift opening stage of the basin whereas the Kansapathar quartzarenites represent the stage of basin stabilization.

To understand the workings of medicine, healing, placebo, belief and rationality, medical anthropologists need to pay attention to the complex relations of various forms of revelation, contemplation, and responding revelation that attach to illness and healing.  In this article two performances of a healing technique located in the agricultural plain of Chhattisgarh, central India, are compared: one representing scientific rationality; the other ‘blind’ superstition.  In both performances the practitioner’s aim is to reveal: the local healer reveals witchcraft objects from the afflicted body; the local rationalist society reveals the healer’s technique as a fraudulent trick.  Each performance shares ‘an aesthetics of revelation’—they rely on seeing or revealing to obtain their social effect.  The interplay between forms of revelation, a reliance of aesthetics for the revelation and the ways of seeing can indicate how distinctions are made (or not) between doctor and quack, expertise and gimmickry, and truth and falsehood.

As long as we act, either as legally appointed dacoits or as patrons bearing a new 'white man's burden' in all the racist senses, we will remain complicit in genocide Karen Gabriel and PK Vijayan Delhi 'We know that the white man does not understand our ways. One portion of land is the same to him as the next, for he is a stranger who comes in the night and takes from the land whatever he needs. The earth is not his brother, but his enemy, and when he has conquered it, he moves on. He leaves his father's graves behind, and he does not care. He kidnaps the earth from his children, and he does not care.'