Poverty and the Quest for Life: Spiritual and Material Striving in Rural India

350 Pages·2015·1.487 MB·English

by  Bhrigupati Singh

Poverty and the
Quest for Life

Poverty and the
Quest for Life
Spiritual and Material Striving in
Rural India
Bhrigupati Singh
The University of Chicago Press Chicago and London
BHRIGUPATI SINGH is assistant professor of anthropology
at Brown University and is coeditor of The Ground Between:
Anthropologists Engage Philosophy.
The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637
The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London
© 2015 by The University of Chicago
All rights reserved. Published 2015.
Printed in the United States of America
24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 1 2 3 4 5
ISBN- 13: 978- 0- 226- 19440- 0 (cloth)
ISBN- 13: 978- 0- 226- 19454- 7 (paper)
ISBN- 13: 978- 0- 226- 19468- 4 (e- book)
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226194684.001.0001
Publication of this book was aided by a grant from the Thomas J.
Watson Jr. Institute for International Studies at Brown University.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Singh, Bhrigupati, author.
Poverty and the quest for life : spiritual and material striving in
rural India / Bhrigupati Singh.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-226-19440-0 (hardcover : alkaline paper) —
ISBN 978-0-226-19454-7 (paperback : alkaline paper) —
ISBN 978-0-226-19468-4 (e-book) 1. Rural poor—India—Rajasthan.
2. Rajasthan (India)—Social conditions. 3. Rajasthan (India)—Social
life and customs. 4. Ethnology—India—Rajasthan. I. Title.
DS485.R25S56 2015
305.5'6909544—dc23
2014016325
a This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48- 1992
(Permanence of Paper).
For Sankalp Sanstha, with affection
For Prerna, with whom my life waxes and wanes

Contents
Acknowledgments ix
Prologue 1
1 First Impressions, and Further 7
2 The Headless Horseman of Central India:
Sovereignty at Varying Thresholds of Life 33
3 Mitra-Varuna: State Power and Powerlessness 59
a. Who Ate Up the Forests? 61
b. Mitra, the Caregiving State 82
4 The Coarse and the Fine: Contours of a Slow- Moving Crisis 103
5 Contracts, Bonds, and Bonded Labor 118
6 Erotics and Agonistics: Intensities Deeper
Than Deep Play 136
7 Divine Migrations: Neighborliness between Humans, Animals,
and Gods 164
8 The Waxing and Waning Life of Kalli 197
9 Bansi Mahatmaya (The Greatness of Bansi),
an Erotic Ascetic 225
10 Departure, and Marriages and Deaths 264
11 The Quality of Life: A Daemonic View 270
Notes 297 References 311 Index 331

Acknowledgments
To think is to thank. When I paused to take stock of whom
I should thank, I was surprised by how many people had
helped compose parts of my self and this text over the past
ten years since I first ventured to Shahabad in 2005. This
book is the result of a kind of Bhramacharya, not in the way
Gandhi meant this term, but in the sense of training and
an extended period of student life. For those to whom it
matters, this book bears the marks, unmistakable signs, of
the habitat of thought in which I was trained: the Depart-
ment of Anthropology at Johns Hopkins University. My
first debt, then— and it is not a burdensome indebtedness
but more a sense of gratitude for a line of flight— is to my
teachers at Johns Hopkins for the very particular inheri-
tance that each one of them gave me, which provided the
scaffolding for the ideas explored ahead. Veena Das taught
me how to sustain a love affair with anthropology even
when making incursions or excursions into neighboring
fields. From her I inherit life as a conceptual and empirical
touchstone against which to measure one’s work. I hope
someday to write a book worthy of offering as Guru Dak-
sina, as she offered to M. N. Srinivas.
Somewhat differently, over the years, through classes
and conversations, William Connolly led me to many of
the philosophical texts and concepts from which I now
draw sustenance. Hent deVries introduced me to the con-
cept of political theologies and gave me a way of approach-
ing questions of religion and secularism that I myself
could believe in, since I was neither a secularist nor an
ix