When I was working with the survivors of a terrible riot in 1984, one day two tall, turbaned men came to my department in Delhi. I was taking a class. They asked the chowkidar [watchman] where I was and then stood outside the class.
My first reaction was that, Oh my god, they are going to be able to find out my office, my home, and then I am going to have to attend to emergencies any time of the day or night.
I am not proud that it was my first thought, but that is what it was.
I interrupted the class and came out and said 84 perhaps said 84 somewhat roughly, "Why have you come here? I told you I will come to the locality at about 2 p.m., I have to take my classes."
They shook their heads and said, "No, no, we have come to warn you that some of the killers are out of the prison 84 they got bail 84 it will be dangerous for you to come there."
It might seem like a single act but in those circumstances, at that time, it was the most courageous, most caring act anyone could have performed for me.
When you study violence, whether spectacular violence or the soft knife of everyday deprivations, you begin to think of the context not through any tropes of horror but through [everyday] encounters.
Violence is [never] absent but [rather] it is folded into the quotidian everyday events and you begin to realize what it is to be spiritual in terms of the near and the low rather than in terms of some transcendental idea of moral perfection.
I had made friends with a person who turned out to be a professional thief.
Once he said to me, "You have done so much for us, what can I do for you? Do you have colored television?"
Meanwhile I had learnt thorough some fortuitous circumstances what his profession was 84 so I said in panic, "No, no, I don't have one, I don't need one."
He went through a list of things he thought I ought to have and I resolutely kept saying no.
At the end he said, "Okay, but let me teach you one thing. You know, the way you carry your bag 84 anyone can steal anything from it. Even I was tempted. So let me tell you how to carry your bag."
I tried to learn but recently thought that I had not been a good pupil when someone tried to sneak behind me and open my bag in a Paris park.
The vigilance of the police thwarted him but my teacher would not have been proud.
You have lots of fun with the people you are studying but I always have a sense of failure that my capacity to sustain life is so much poorer than what the occasion demands. I fail people so often but people will make excuses for me all the time.
For instance, where I work, no one likes it that I come away to teach in the U.S. A way of reproaching me is to say, "Sister (or aunty or madam, whatever other term comes to their mind), how long do you have to go on studying?"
Veena Das is the Krieger-Eisenhower Professor of Anthropology and Chair of the Johns Hopkins Anthropology Department.
She specializes in the study of violence and social suffering, and is currently studying the relationship between ecology, health and family decision making among the urban poor in Delhi.
Professor Das taught at the University of Delhi for 33 years. She currently serves on the executive board of the Institute for Social and Economic Research in Development and Democracy in Delhi alongside the International Center for Ethnic Studies in Colombo.
She has been named a foreign honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She has also received an honorary doctorate from the University of Chicago.
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