This article is based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted with the Indian community in Houston, as part of a NIH-NHGRI-sponsored ethics study and sample collection initiative entitled "Indian and Hindu Perspectives on Genetic Variation Research." At the heart of this research is one central exchange-blood samples donated for genetic research-that draws both the Indian community and a community of researchers into an encounter with bioethics. I consider the meanings that come to be associated with blood donation as it passes through various hands, agendas, and associated ethical filters on its way to the lab bench: how and why blood is solicited, how the giving and taking of blood is rationalized, how blood as material substance is alienated, processed, documented, and made available for the promised ends of basic science research. Examining corporeal substances and asking what sorts of gifts and problems these represent, I argue, sheds some light on two imbricated tensions expressed by a community of Indians, on the one hand, and of geneticists and basic science researchers, on the other hand: that gifts ought to be free (but are not), and that science ought to be pure (but is not). In this article, I explore how experiences of bioethics are variously shaped by the histories and habits of Indic giving, prior sample collection controversies, commitments to "good science" and the common "good of humanity," and negotiations of the sites where research findings circulate.

The category of "caste" has had a long history both in and out of the Indian subcontinent, one that is frequently intertwined with that of "race." From H. H. Risley's use of late-nineteenth century European race science in anthropometric research, to Max Müeller's articulation of the Aryan theory of race and pan-Africanist expressions of racial solidarity with the lower castes of India, caste has frequently been redefined and politicized by being drawn into wider discourses about race. Informed by this complex history, this essay asks how "race" and "caste" have come to serve as key metaphors of socio-political struggle, illuminating one-another and emerging as potent rhetorical strategies of social critique, particularly in India but increasingly also in more global contexts. I argue that Dalit groups in contemporary India move their concerns into global forums such as the 2001 UN World Conference Against Racism by appropriating ideas about caste and religion that have long been used to mystify the local and "native" inhabitants—ideas that are themselves the subjects of established ethnographic critique. As such, this essay remains aware of the difficulties of bringing anthropological concerns to bear on analyses of on-going political struggle.

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This article is the third and last in a series of three surveying research on Hindutva (Hindu nationalism or political Hinduism), focusing on praxis: processes by which hindutva is mobilized, operationalized, and made relatable to specific contexts. As hindutva’s influences expand to grassroots and diasporic contexts, mediated by discourses of rights, development, and cultures of multiculturalist ethnic assertions, hindutva becomes a mediating discourse in its own right. As such, it is sometimes a diffused logic and sometimes a clear point of reference, but always undeniably central to contemporary political practice at all levels. (The first essay in this series of three surveyed literature on seminal ideological articulations of hindutva, both historical and contemporary; the second examined prominent rhetorical constructions deployed to politically oppose hindutva).

In the summer of 2011, in the wake of some of India's worst corruption scandals, a civil society group calling itself India Against Corruption was mobilizing unprecedented nationwide support for the passage of a strong Jan Lokpal (Citizen's Ombudsman) Bill by the Indian Parliament. The movement was, on its face, unusual: its figurehead, the 75-yearold Gandhian, Anna Hazare, was apparently rallying urban, middle-class professionals and youth in great numbers-a group otherwise notorious for its political apathy. The scale of the protests, of the scandals spurring them, and the intensity of media attention generated nothing short of a spectacle: the sense, if not the reality, of a united India Against Corruption. Against this background, we ask: what shared imagination of corruption and political dysfunction, and what political ends are projected in the Lokpal protests? What are the class practices gathered under the ''middle-class'' rubric, and how do these characterize the unusual politics of summer 2011? Wholly permeated by routine habits of consumption, we argue that the Lokpal protests are fundamentally structured by the impulse to remake social relations in the image of products and ''India'' itself into a trusted brand. Taking ''corruption'' as a site at which the middle class discursively constitutes itself, we trace the idioms and mechanisms by which the Lokpal agitation re-articulates the very terms of politics, citizenship, and democracy in contemporary India.