Shock and shove: the embodied politics of force in India

Abstract

This essay examines the phenomenological and political dimensions of force in north India. Manifest as embodied experience, and as power and domination, force encompasses felt emotion and collective clout. Yet unlike other categories traversing the political and experiential, force has been comparatively understudied. This paper surveys ethnographic and historical examples where force is prevalent. We see it in urban life, as an idiom of moral states, as embedded in community narratives and social hierarchies, and as enacting political demarcations. A focus is on the 1992 nationalist destruction of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya, when force was invoked and expressed. Through this study, certain tensions and paradoxes are raised. Force is seen as indispensable to state authority and legal sanction. Simultaneously, it is a field of potentials irreducible to human intentions. While force is a recurring locus of impetus and influence, it is also volatile and delinquent. It gives us insight into moments of concatenation without presuming contained interest or enduring stability. Force, affective and effective, is also slippery and insurrectionary, illuminating processes of mutability and contingency, in India as elsewhere.