Veena Das, Critical events: An anthropological perspective on contemporary

India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1995)

Critical events, without doubt, offers exciting reading. There are extremely
absorbing ethnographic details, analysis and insights, as might be expected
from the work of a scholar of Veena Das stature. She has a knack of being
forceful in her presentation. Das must have confronted genuine difficulties in
taking up such a complex task, but does the work really offer us a way out of
the theoretical sluggishness of Indian anthropology? Does it address the
reality of India adequately?
Before I present a critical review, I must point out that Veena Das has been
unusually and generously apologetic (see pp. 28, 209), to a degree which
could

almost

pre-empt

criticism.

Her

carefully

crafted

apologies

notwithstanding, Critical events needs to be addressed critically for what it

could come to stand for, as a reviewer elsewhere has shown. The temptation
Das work offers for critical comment is much too intense and I shall
succumb to it, albeit within my responsibility as a reviewer.
To begin with, Das has generated a narrative (though she claims not to have
done so) and has based it on a medical metaphor. Thus, as India unfolds, she
produces a particular kind of (socially) organic condition requiring
sympathetic intervention: critical events. Enlightened understanding of these
events requires the use of a complex diagnostic apparatus: ethnography. In
the end, Das proposes therapeutic intervention to relieve bodily pain
generated during critical events: a new social anthropology for India (p.
196), almost the way Habermas reconstructs the role of psychoanalysis.

The earlier Indian anthropologists operated with the metaphor of the

colonialist and therefore thought in terms of locality (an academic
modification of the favourite colonialist term, territory). In attempting to redirect anthropological concerns, Veena Das replaces the earlier emphasis of
the colonialist metaphor of locality with a (benign) medical metaphor.
In changing the metaphor, Veena Das has sought to transform social
anthropology into a therapeutically active enterprise responding to events that
produce much bodily pain in order to offer relief. In short, Das contribution
presents social anthropology as therapy. It shares pain. Consequently, Das
construction puts a pressure on the community of social anthropologists to
share the pain of the communities that get trapped in critical events.
Notwithstanding Das noble intentions, can social anthropology in India be
shaped and re-directed only to do this?
The privileging of therapeutic intervention as the only form of social
anthropology for India is perhaps necessary, but it is limited in scope and
effect. It also stems from a certain defeatist attitude. Perhaps such a role for
social anthropology in India must be considered along with two other forms.
One form of social anthropology must be conceived of as an intervention in
non-critical events, or organic crisis as a Gramscian would understand it.
While Das-ian social anthropology intervenes therapeutically, we also need
a social anthropology that intervenes to re-constitute the terms of human
experience in the spectacular and everyday theatres of history. This form is
hinted at, but not developed by Das. Ethnography offers social
anthropologists a way to work with categories available with the people, and
not impose categories from outside, in the act of re-direction. The other form

of social anthropology must be able to address and sustain the condition of

diversity/plurality in India. Social anthropology in India must either look at
or look beyond the traditional responses to diversity, that is, universalism,
developmentalism and relativism (as Richard Schweider would have it).
In addition to the aforementioned, the book also prompts the following
queries:
1. Who decides which events are critical events? Anthropologists like Veena
Das? A community of social scientists? The state? This methodological
problem needs to be resolved.
2. Veena Das claims that she has written a book as an Indian and as a
woman. Both identities are vague and therefore unacceptable. A work
influenced by a strain of post-modernist thought and practice must therefore
take this identification to a practical end. Veena Das is definitely an Indian.
But this is too generic a category to make a sense in the highly complex
ethnic situation in contemporary India. Who is an Indian? In addition, she not
only belongs to a particular class and a particular community of Indian
academics, but also holds an important place in that community. The cultural
capital she commands cannot be swept under the carpet by making a claim
that she is just an Indian and a woman. Veena Das is not just any woman.
All these are bound to be implicated in the voice she claims to raise. This is
not just a work by Veena Das; it is a product of a context and a
community.
3. The claim that her voice is a voice among other voices is a weak statement, to
say the least. Humility in this form is really unnecessary. Das is not just out

there in the crowd shouting to make a statement. Hers is a voice that wants to
subdue or arrest other voices by a brand of academic criticism and the right to
use it. We have a Veena Das in her elemental spirit. Where is her ground for
the sort of criticisms she makes? Her criticisms are theoretically illegitimate
and belong to a bygone era; they cannot be sustained in an academic
environment that wants pluralism, that wants a voice to thrive among other
voices. Thus, while Das anthropology is post-modernist, her criticisms are
modernist! A relativist using a universalist form of criticism; Nietzschean
stealing the weapon of a Hegelian: completely illegitimate.
4. The anthropology of pain is rather an interesting contribution. But let us be
clear. In India, as elsewhere in the world, pain is not the monopoly of critical
events. The pain created by organs of the state in the state penitentiaries or in
the legally unprotected production centres (in which you also have children)
are also territories of pain. Thus, an anthropology of pain must really address
a wider concern, the kind of concern Elaine Scarry has shown. And it should
be extracted out of the medical metaphor, for in Veena Das the anthropology
of pain seems to be a natural component of the underlying metaphor that
guides her work. Pain is a part of other discourses too.
Critical events is a worthwhile book, for it sharply poses the plight of social
anthropology in India. Perhaps more people must now speak up for the kind
of social anthropology they want for India. Is there any other way that we can
make Critical events one among many voices?
M. Nadarajah
Stamford College (Contributions to Indian Sociology, 1997)