the headless horseman of central india: sovereignty at varying thresholds of life

CATHE HEADLESS HORSEMAN OF CENTRAL INDIA:Sovereignty at Varying Thresholds of Life

BHRIGUPATI SINGHBrown University

How do we imagine power? A recent wave of anthropological thought hasbeen drawn to the concept of sovereign power, a theoretical turn or returnassociated primarily with the writings of Giorgio Agamben and his reanimation ofCarl Schmitt.1 I was led to a different conception of sovereignty by a deity, localand global in scope. How might a god or a spirit inspire us to think differentlyabout sovereignty, or life? I approach this question, beginning with an ethnographicpuzzle.

A HISTORIAN’S CONCLUSION AND AN ETHNOGRAPHER’S

STARTING POINT

Between 2005 and 2007, I conducted ethnographic fieldwork in Shahbad, asubdistrict of 236 villages in the state of Rajasthan on its southeastern border withMadhya Pradesh. My focus was primarily on the Sahariyas, arguably the loweststatus group in Shahbad, described locally as both a Hindu jati (caste or tribe) and asadivasi (original inhabitants), classified as a “scheduled tribe” in government terms.The fuzziness of caste and tribe classifications has long been explored in SouthAsian anthropology, as have varying modes of relatedness and power differentialsbetween groups such as the Sahariyas and their low- and high- status neighbors.One such sign of relatedness (or is it, rather, I wondered, homage to formerlydominant power?) are small roadside shrines with a memorial stone depicting aheadless horseman that dots the landscape of Shahbad. “This is Thakur Baba,” I

CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY, Vol. 27, Issue 2, pp. 383–407. ISSN 0886-7356, online ISSN 1548-1360. C© 2012 bythe American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved. DOI: 10.1111/j.1548-1360.2012.01148.x

CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY 27:2

FIGURE 1. Memorial Shrine for Thakur Baba. (Photo by author)

was told by many. Baba (venerable entity) is a suffix of respect used for ascetics oreven for ordinary elderly men. “Yeh pura issi ka area hain” [This is his area], somewould say in hushed tones, gesturing to the shrine. “This area” could denote variabledistances, usually only a few acres around the shrine. Every village in Shahbad has atleast two such shrines. An active shrine is usually attached to a male ghodala (spiritmedium). Men and women also encounter Thakur Baba in dreams or in visionsof a man, often headless, on a horse. My mind wandered to sightings of headlessriders, spirit horsemen the world over, not necessarily a “timeless” figure giventhat the domestication of horses is a roughly dateable event (Simpson 1951:25). Iremained in pursuit of more immediate specifics. Who exactly is Thakur Baba? Imulled over the most common description to be found in Shahbad: “He is a devata

(deity), a shakti (force). He is called Thakur because he is a Rajput (warrior caste)who died in battle. His head was cut off but he continued to fight.”

Where could I locate the power that Thakur Baba expresses? Unless we lookto the tourist brochures of Indian heritage hotels, it would be impossible to finda present-day Rajput who embodies the martial ethos of a horse-bound warrior’sdeath. And yet in many areas of Rajasthan and central India, the deified specterof Thakur Baba subsists among high and low castes and tribes, former generationsof whom may have lived under the rule of Rajputs. Why do these social groupspreserve this “feudal” figure among spirits, even though he is materially outmodedand even outlawed in terms of older jagiri (fiefdom) based modes of land tenure incontemporary India? Is the ghost deity of Thakur Baba simply an expression of thetraumatic memory of feudalism, a form of spiritual oppression? If we are not toentirely negate the force of his veneration, we will have to find a different way of

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THE HEADLESS HORSEMEN OF CENTRAL INDIA

approaching Thakur Baba. Do we deny or fix a necessarily declining value to thisgod? We might call this a theological evaluation, whether posited by believers orunbelievers.

To clarify the political implications of these theological stakes, I will gesture totwo ways in which we might devalue such a deity, either as entirely unknowable or astoo easily knowable, as a form of deified power that simply mirrors feudal authorityfrom an earlier era. A strong argument for the unknowable is to be found in DipeshChakrabarty’s analysis of the Santal tribal leaders of an anticolonial rebellion who,while facing execution declared, “I rebelled . . . because Thakur made an appearanceand told me to rebel” (2000:103). Chakrabarty calls this a “subaltern past” becauseit deals with the “supernatural.” A historian will invariably “interpret” and therebyrationalize such a statement, a move that for Chakrabarty reveals an “irreduciblegap” between the “rational” historian and the “supernaturally infused world of theSantal” (2000:106). My discomfort hinges on the terms supernatural and world of the

Santal [tribal]. Such a deity, as we will see, is not confined to an entirely inscrutable“tribal” world.

As crucially, I seek a view of life different from the rational–supernaturaldichotomy. Chakrabarty criticizes the way in which such cosmological gaps arecovered up, mediated by “Eurocentric universal” terms. For instance, when GyanPrakash compares Maalik devta, the “spirits of dead landlords,” among bondedlaborers in Bihar with Tio, the “devil” worshipped by miners in Bolivia, “the com-parison must pass through the Eurocentric universal mediating term of capitalistproduction, pictured as the power of the landlord” (Chakrabarty 1997:41). In-stead of such universals, Chakrabarty calls for “very local, particular, one-for-oneexchanges” (1997:48), a kind of “anti-sociology” (1997:51). The gap between therational historian and the Santal cannot be mended by “anthropological cobbling”(Chakrabarty 1997:58). Challenging this putdown, I attempt an anthropologicalinvestigation into this weave of life, “cobbling” that can go further than merelyaccepting the gaps and aporia of national or colonial history. Perhaps anthropology,like physics, needs a more delicate string theory that weaves between differentdimensions and thresholds. This approach will not be the same as that of a devotee,but it can certainly take some steps toward sensing a deity’s force and form of lifeand death within a milieu.

Sensing Thakur baba’s life force in Shahbad, I return ahead to one of the oldestquestions of anthropology: how might we conceive of the dead and spirits anddeities as participants among the living? Following Gilles Deleuze, I suggest theidea of varying thresholds of life, human and nonhuman (2001:6). Moreover, Thakur

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Baba, I argue, expresses a force translatable across several political theologies,sensed but missed by Chakrabarty. The “power of the landlord” is not limited tothe Eurocentric terms of capitalist production. Rather, I contend that it relatesto the question of sovereignty: power over life, a type of relation relevant tomany forms of human and divine hierarchy. If we are not to deaden the termEurocentrism into a means of scholarly racial profiling, then we may be receptiveto the comparative potential of the concept of sovereignty I am drawn to, whichhinges on a reading of the early Vedic divinities, Mitra-Varuna.

What do divinities tell us about sovereignty? I return to the opening question:how do we imagine sovereignty? The renewed attraction within anthropology andneighboring disciplines to the concept of sovereignty, understood as “power overlife within a territory,” is perhaps legible as a desire to reconsider how power is“centered,” a generation after Michel Foucault’s emphasis on the dispersal of power(Hansen and Stepputat 2006:296). The return to this concept via Agamben (andSchmitt), however, almost invariably leads to declarations of global catastrophe,with sovereign power exerting a near-totalizing force over an abyss of “bare life”(1998). Although this may be a compelling perspective in some cases, for examplefor security states and death camps, we might ask in what other ways can weconceive of sovereignty? In an influential definition of the term, in Political Theology

(1985), Schmitt asserts that modern concepts of authority, what he calls “stateconcepts,” namely our image of sovereign power is a “secularized theologicalconcept” (1985:36). To reopen this definition, I ask what we mean by theology ortheos? What image of a deity or concept of life and its deification do we assume?Schmitt’s assumption of an omnipotent god led him to posit a “decisionist” totalizingauthority (1985:36).2 I contend that a more pluralized sense of theos might openup other ways of thinking about sovereign power. This article is a step toward thatprospect.

In each section ahead, I attempt to move closer to Thakur Baba, as a particularexpression of sovereignty, and of life. As a first step, I dispute an analyticaldevaluation distinct from his confinement to an entirely unknowable “subalternpast” that would all too easily claim to know this mode of deified power, reducingit simply to a mirror of kingship or caste-based feudal authority in an earlierepoch. Instead I offer a major and minor definition of the Rajput warrior thatreopens Thakur Baba’s image to lower levels of sovereignty, open to various castesand tribes. Ethnographically encountering Thakur Baba’s sacred ambivalence, hiscapacity to both harm and bless, I set out a bipolar concept of sovereignty as varyingrelations of force and contract, a mode of power I find best named by the theos of

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the Vedic gods Mitra-Varuna, outlined ahead. Engaging Thakur Baba’s presence assuch, I examine his vitality at varying thresholds of life, in forceful and contractual

human–spirit relations, as also in his mode of deification as a human sacrifice.Because I began with a disagreement with a historian that involves returning

to well-trodden anthropological territory such as ancestral spirits, sacrifice andsacred ambivalence, I find myself having to contend with the charge against “old”anthropology as being “ahistorical” and “timeless” (Hansen and Stepputat2006:296). Rather than accept this charge, I argue ahead that anthropology of-ten inhabits infrahistorical and suprahistorical thresholds of life that subsist alongwith, but are not wholly subsumed by historical time. This is not to say that thesethresholds of life are static or unchanging. Rather, in conclusion I examine howthese human-divine relations may alter, endure, or decline.

Given my focus on a “local” deity, it would be tempting to argue that whilethe recent turn to political theology in critical theory (Agamben 1998; DeVriesand Sullivan 2006; Zizek et al. 2006), largely rests on Abrahamic monotheisticassumptions, I turn instead to polytheistic popular Hinduism. However, what is atstake, I will argue, is not necessarily “local” polytheism versus “global” monotheismbut, rather, an attentiveness to lower strata of deified life, spirits, warrior–asceticsaints and ancestral shrines, which are widespread in many parts of the world,albeit in varied and dispersed forms. Although I focus on an example in popularHinduism, I will mark the resonances with other religions, including East Asiandeities, as well as aspects of Christianity and Islam ignored by the particular readingof the Abrahamic tradition assumed by Schmitt or others who would uncriticallyaccept the term monotheism. Let us begin by reopening the figure of the warrior tomore polyvalent possibilities, if we are not to reduce Thakur Baba simply to anexpression of “feudal” territorial authority.

MAJOR AND MINOR VALENCES OF THE RAJPUT WARRIOR

How might we understand the particularity of the Rajput, as a figureof sovereign power? A commonsensical idea of feudalism necessarily equatessovereignty with kingship or royal kinship. According to this definition, theRajputs, genealogically organized into 36 “royal races,” lorded over diverse parts ofnorth India, living in jagir fiefs and thikanas (larger fiefs, usually based out of a fort;see Hitchcock 1959:10). In Shahbad, though, as far back as land records go, therewere only three border jagirs barely covering a village each and not a single thikana.

In conversation with local historians I soon learned the names of the successiverulers of the area. I found that Thakur Baba’s presence invoked no relation to any

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known royal lineage of Kota or Gwalior, the two main kingdoms in the region.Is there only one Thakur Baba or are there many, I asked, because many shrineshad site-specific additions to their names, Hira Singh Thakur, Dangahi Thakur, orGond Thakur. The general consensus: “Many Rajputs died while fighting. Theseshrines mark the spots where they were killed.” And what battles were these?Answers to such historical questions were invariably vague: “There must have beenbattles . . . in the time of kings.” Right-leaning neoliterates offered more “histor-ical” suggestions: “These are shaheed (martyrs). We call them vir (braves). Theywere Hindus who died fighting Muslims.” Which Muslims? They were uncertain.“Mughals? Or other Rajputs? Rajputs were always fighting each other.” The sourceof Thakur Baba’s power, I realized, was not to be found in historically identifiableroyalty.

Nor could I find formerly dominant clans among the handful of Rajput familieswho lived in present-day Shahbad. Most lived in relatively straitened circumstancesand claimed no past glories, “The royalty you read about in history books wasmaybe 1 percent of the lot. The rest of us were naukars (servants), fighting battles,getting killed.” Are these masters demoting themselves to servants? I found adifferent valence for these words and hierarchies in Dirk Kolff’s Naukar, Rajput

and Sepoy (1990), which defines the term Rajput not as king but through the wordnaukari, a Mongolian term for “service in a war band” (1990:20). Naukari is stillcommonplace in Indian languages to denote “service” or “job,” of high or low status,while the noun form naukar (servant) has pejorative class connotations. Naukari wasa crucial term in the bloodiest conflict of medieval north and central India that wasnot between Hindus and Muslims but, rather, between Mughals and Afghans, thelatter particularly of the Lodi dynasty. Within this conflict, naukar soldiers couldbelong to varied castes and tribes, serving under patrons with shifting alliances (Kolff1990:182). Rajputs, for instance, fought both for and against Afghans and Mughals.Moreover, Afghan and Rajput, Kolff argues, were not exclusive ethnic groups,but also contractual soldier identities (1990:57). The main recruiting centers forcaste and tribe soldiers until 1850 were Malwa and Bundelkhand in central Indianeighboring Shahbad and an area of Bihar farther east, also called Shahbad, thecenter of the renowned Afghan warrior Sher Shah Suri (Kolff 1990:59).

Kolff describes how this culture of war declined with the ascendancy ofMughal and then British sovereignty. A gradually emerging centralized state beganto disable the earlier network of mobile war bands. Kolff dates the beginningsof the settled Rajput “genealogical orthodoxy” to the 16th and 17th centuries.The modern definition of the Rajput was hardened into “thirty-six royal races” by

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British colonial historians such as James Tod whose widely read Annals and Antiquities

of Rajasthan (1997) is now owned by most notable Rajput families. In contrast,accounts such as Kolff’s show us centuries of intermingling and competition toextend the ambit of the term Rajput. Understood as such, I will claim both majorand minor definitions. The major one centers on genealogy, property, and royalty.Untraceable in the major definition, Thakur Baba perhaps expresses the minorvariation, the figure of a warrior as a possibility of life, open for centuries to severalcastes and tribes.

The minor definition does not eliminate the possibility of violence amonggroups identified as Rajput and their neighboring tribes and castes. The largestgroup in Shahbad is the Sahariyas (34 percent of the population), whose scheduledtribe category includes Bhils, Gonds, Santals and other groups across central India,also known as adivasi (original inhabitants). Colonial historians speculated that priorto their absorption as a warrior caste, and then as royalty, in later centuries, theRajputs were migrant “Scythic tribes,” because their sacrificial rituals resembledthose of horse-based warrior groups in Central Asia (Tod 1997:464). Althoughsuch racial hypotheses are uncertain at best (and are complicated by extensions andadmixtures such as those described by Kolff), historians have recorded centuriesof warfare among Rajputs, Bhils, Gonds and other central Indian tribes (Skaria1999:75). Kota, now described as a former Rajput kingdom (which includedShahbad) is known to have been founded by the Koteah Bhil tribe, marked bya memorial site in the city of Kota. Until the 14th century, for his coronationthe Rana (king or chief) of Mewar, a leading Rajput kingdom, had his foreheadmarked with the blood of a Bhil chief, drawn from his thumb or big toe (Kramrisch1968:52). This may have been a ritual familiar to warrior cultures in several partsof the world, such as the investiture of Julius Caesar with the sacrifice of a defeatedGaul chief, although in the Rajput case we have a sacrificial substitution, a drop ofblood instead of a human life. So while this ritual may be understood as consecratedtribal dominance, harder to explain “historically” are Bhil rituals that incorporatethe Rajputs. An ethnographer of the central Indian Bhils notes: “the figure of therider on his horse plays the leading role in the essential ‘death-in-life’ tribal rite ofthe Bhil, although the Bhil neither raise nor use horses. The equestrian figure inart and legend is associated with the feudal Hindu Rajputs, the northern neighborsof the Bhil. . . . The Bhil use the image of the horseman . . . as the Ancestor ofthe clan” (Kramrisch 1968:52). How did this man on a horse become a “clanancestor”? Let us attend more closely to the specific forms of power exercised byThakur Baba.

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VARYING THRESHOLDS OF LIFE: HUMANS, SPIRITS, DEITIES,

THE UNDEAD, AND THE UNBORN

Unlike most other Hindu deities, there is no elaborate mythology connectedto Thakur Baba. Instead I encountered descriptions of ritual, mainly of threetypes. The first regarded troublesome ancestral spirits known as Preet, those inone’s lineage, particularly an unmarried male who died an akaal mrityu (untimelydeath). Thakur Baba is said to control such wandering spirits. A second ritual task

FIGURE 2. Thakur Baba with subordinate Preet ancestral shrine. (Photo by author)

involves requests for childbirth (santaan prapti) addressed to Thakur Baba, and thethird involves healing a disorder, usually by expelling a weaker spirit causing theailment. In addition to ritual efficacy were stories of momentary assistance. Forinstance, I sometimes felt uneasy walking through a forest or between villages atnight. I was told that this was a common vulnerability. At such times one took thename of Thakur Baba, “Take care of me, Baba, I walk under your protection.” Iheard more exalted stories of guardianship in various villages: “Once dacoits cameto loot our village. They had barely crossed the shrine on that hill when they werestopped. Thakur Baba had turned them blind! The dacoits knew it was him, ‘Victoryto Thakur Baba,’ they had to say and turn back.” These descriptions returned to abasic premise: “He is a Vir. He gives force, life, courage.”

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My closest research associate in Shahbad, Gajanand, in his mid-sixties, a low-status tailor by caste and profession, stressed the way specific families are linked toshrines:

In a way Thakur Baba is everyone’s poorvaj [ancestor]. Almost every householdhas an untimely dead ancestral Preet, linked to a chabootra [byway shrine] forThakur Baba. Like our family shrine for my father’s unmarried kakaji [youngeruncle]. He had hair till his ankles, my grandmother used to say. One day on ajourney, he suddenly vomited and died. He became a Preet and so my eldersgot a shrine constructed for him at the spot where he died. This was near theshrine of Thakur Baba in Tilpassi [an abandoned village nearby], so our Preetcomes under him.

Along with the untimely dead, the other key threshold at which Thakur Babajoins specific families is that of the not yet born. In a ritual and terminologicaloverlap with Pir (saintly or ascetic) shrines in popular Islam, a childbirth requestto Thakur Baba is called mannat or jholi-bharna (filling), describing a ritual inwhich a woman lays out her chunni (shawl) into which the spirit medium placesa coconut, grains, or incense from the shrine, which are then ingested by thewoman. Gajanand’s father and his eldest daughter had been born as blessings fromthe incense of the Tilpassi Thakur. The spirit medium for their shrine was KailashBhargava, a Brahmin from Gajanand’s village. “Belief” in Thakur Baba does notnecessarily translate into submission or piety to his mediums who may be fromhigh or low castes or tribes. Gajanand distrusted Kailash Bhargava: “He drinks; he isdishonest and lecherous.” However, Gajanand began to trust him as a spirit mediumwhen Gajanand’s wife was suffering from an illness that couldn’t be cured despite“injections” (a common metaphor for pharmaceutical treatments). Possessed byThakur Baba, Kailash Bhargava pointed out an abandoned shrine belonging to theformer owners of their house. Once this abandoned deity was appeased, Gajanand’swife was cured. Gajanand described other rituals undertaken by a household linkedto a specific shrine, marking further stages of life: paalna (a baby born as a blessingfrom Thakur Baba is brought to the shrine to be placed in a crib for the first time),bacchon ke baal (a baby’s first haircut), and shaadi ka gathjoda (during a wedding,a ritual knot is tied linking the bride and bridegroom, which is untied at theshrine).

As a point of conceptual departure we might notice that one approachesThakur Baba not as an individual but as a member of a household or a clan, as oneamong a set of relations located spatially and by kin. These local relations open out

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further, in ways as global as the religions of otherworldly salvation. In fact, withthis form of clan-based veneration we arrive at one of the founding locations ofanthropology. In Principles of Sociology, Herbert Spencer named “ancestor worship”as the origin of all religion, the later “high” gods being only heightened forms ofthe deified dead (1896:272). Revising Spencer’s view in The Elementary Forms of

Religious Life (2001), Emile Durkheim, posits larger collective clan-based veneration(“totemism”), as distinct from household ancestor worship, as the basis of religiouslife. Perhaps we are not interested in such global transcendence anymore. Howmight we reinhabit a founding location? Let us ask: with what conception of life canwe consider ghosts, deities and the dead as participants among living households?Jean Langford has argued that Agamben’s idea of bare life precludes any sociality inthe existences imagined for the dead (2009:684). As a response to this provocation,I offer the term thresholds of life, as a way of engaging ancestors, spirits, the undeadand the not yet born, who subsist alongside the living. I use thresholds in two senses:firstly to denote points of passage across stages and phases of life, as the living havewith their initiations, births, marriages and deaths, ritually marked with ThakurBaba. Secondly, thresholds also refers to varying degrees of intensity that maycontinue at postdeath thresholds, as a spirit is preserved or recedes from memoryor ritual possession or visions, enduring in as many dimensions perhaps as stringtheory gestures toward. Such movements of life are not limited to humans, andthe intensities involved are not fully knowable, even as they may compose ordecompose our most “rational” selves. I argue ahead that sacrifice, as a key elementof religio (“to join”) may be understood as an attempt to join or rejoin varyingthresholds of life.

What then do I mean by life, if it is to include the dead and deities? Here, Iredirect a key turn in Durkheim’s Elementary Forms of Religious Life. According toDurkheim, the basis of religion is an engagement with a vital animating principle,“a kind of anonymous and impersonal force. . . . None possesses it entirely and allshare in it. This force is so independent of the particular subjects embodying it thatit both preexists and survives them” (2001:140). And further, “Spirits, demons,genies, gods of every rank are merely the concrete forms that capture this energy,this ‘potentiality’” (Durkheim 2001:148). A remarkable formulation except thatat this promising juncture Durkheim reduces this vast potentiality to his signatureform of transcendence, “the moral authority of society” (2001:155): “The basicpurpose of the religious engagement with life is to reawaken solidarity. . . . Thecult really does periodically recreate a moral entity on which we depend, as itdepends on us. And this entity does exist: it is society” (2001:258). We may call

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this an exhausted formulation, or we may call it a spot ripe for recultivation. I willsay that these vital energies and intensities expressed in varying forms, human andnonhuman, are life, understood from the monist perspective of Deleuze as a “vastcontinuum of human and non-human life” (Deleuze 2001:6). This continuum isnot timeless or static. Rather, it is composed of varying thresholds that move alongdifferent rhythms of actual conscious and potential nonconscious levels of time.

As such I neither affirm nor doubt the “existence” of spirits. A memory, adream, even a hallucination is also a threshold of life, depending on the thresholdsto which we are open. Here by open, I mean immersed in or potentially able toreceive such a threshold of life. For instance, a potential Preet is not declared assuch from the outset. Going over the funerary rituals of various castes, I learnedthat an untimely death receives exactly the same ritual treatment as any other deathin the family. The Pinda, the postcremation representation of the transitioningbody of the deceased, usually a ball of flour, represents both an ancestor and anembryo (Gold 1988:131), that is, a potentially regenerative life. As an interruptedthreshold in the continuum of life, a new Preet may manifest many months or yearslater, most commonly through the possession of a relative, reanimating an existingpotentiality of deification. Although I consider the ancestral Preet and Thakur Babato be thresholds of life, their existence, contra Durkheim, is not necessarily areaffirmation of the social unity of living kin. I am as interested in the differencesand conflicts between these varying thresholds. A key problem in a monist conceptof life is the question of power. How do varying thresholds exert power over oneanother and what might we mean by power in this sense?

SOVEREIGNTY AND POWER OVER LIFE

Anthropologists have often found spirits expressing both “benevolence” and“malevolence,” a bipolarity that Durkheim famously named the “ambivalence of thesacred” (2001:306). Comparably, I found that while Thakur Baba could bless withchildbirth or protection, troubles could also issue from these thresholds, usuallyattributed to a displeased ancestral Preet. How do we understand this ambivalence?The most common anthropological answer correlates the power of spirits to a formof social authority with which relations may vary for good and for ill. For instance,Arthur Wolf describes the deities and ancestral spirits that inhabit rural China,sin (deities), kui (spirits without descendants who die an untimely death) and“foreign soldier” spirits subordinate to T’u Ti Kung, a “locality governor” deitywhose task is to “police the kui” (Wolf 1974:134). Pictured as “a vast supernaturalbureaucracy,” the Chinese rural pantheon, according to Wolf, is a “reflection of

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the social landscape . . . peasants understandably awed by the power of imperialofficials” (1974:9).

Such analyses cannot tell us how these spirit thresholds may subsist and varylong after their “corresponding” social authority form wanes, be it Chinese or Rajputimperial power. Further, the question remains of how we understand authorityor power in the first place, social or spiritual. What is at stake here is a conceptof sovereignty, power over life within a relatively delimited territory. “This is hisarea,” as they say for Thakur Baba. How might we imagine a political theology thatenfolds ambivalent potentialities of sovereign power such as violence and welfare?Distinct from the omnipotent decision-making god assumed by Schmitt, I turnto a bipolar theology, outlined by Georges Dumezil in Mitra-Varuna: An Essay on

Two Indo-European Representations of Sovereignty (1988; see also Deleuze and Guattari1987:351), which draws striking parallels between the Vedic sovereign deities Mitraand Varuna and the legendary founding figures of Ancient Rome, Romulus withhis warrior ambitions and the peaceful “elderly” rule of law defined by Numa. Thekey resonance according to Dumezil is that Romulus and Varuna as force define the“terrible” and violent aspect of sovereign power, while Numa and Mitra as contract

define its “friendly” or “pact-making” aspect (1988:46). Varuna like Romulus isthe “founding violence” of sovereignty (Dumezil 1988:116) that remains copresentin varying degrees with Mitra the negotiator. At times they appear in Vedic textsas alternating light and dark rhythms. Understood as complementarities, Dumezilargues, force and contract together constitute sovereignty (1988:80). I take force

to mark a potentiality of coercion, while contract signals a variably negotiable bond,involving different modes of give and take. I call this concept of sovereignty bipolar,

resonant with Deleuze and Guattari’s use of the term schizophrenia (1987), inasmuchas it marks a nondialectical tension that remains unresolved and virtually copresentat varying thresholds.

In comparison Agamben’s severely heightened negative dialectical concept ofsovereignty (1998) embodies a totalizing elevation of Varuna (the terrible) in a waythat wholly eliminates the potentialities of Mitra. Agamben’s concept of sovereigntyalso draws on Roman law, but in his analysis ancient Rome is understood not bywhat gave it vitality and life but, rather, by its most negative excluded element,the banished criminal “bare life” (1998:73). This most negative of negatives, “in-cluded by exclusion” and redefined as Homo sacer is then promoted by an inscrutablesynthesis into a “zone of indistinction” with sovereign power (Agamben 1998:83).This promotion is thereafter modernized and further heightened to the extent ofannouncing a global disaster, “the new nomos of the earth will soon extend itself over

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the entire planet” (Agamben 1998:38); “Today we are all virtually bare life” (Agam-ben 1998:115); “an unprecedented biopolitical catastrophe” (Agamben 1998:188).What spirits possess us to repeat these gloomy, life-denying judgments? The point isnot to score an analytical victory but, rather, to ask what analysis might be. A morefertile ethnographic question, even in the most catastrophic circumstances, wouldbe to track the particular modes of force and contract or negotiation at work withina milieu. Perhaps future work, including my own,3 will show the relevance ofthe Mitra-Varuna political theology for anthropological ideas of secularized power.For now I only hint that this characterization of sovereignty illuminates seeminglycontradictory tendencies, a potentiality recent authors describe as “compassion andrepression” (Fassin 2005), or “sympathy” (Rutherford 2009) and “coercion” (Perry2009) as (bipolar) tendencies of sovereign power.

With this concept of sovereignty I understand the ambivalent variability ofThakur Baba’s power more clearly as modes of force and contract. Punitive force,for instance, can be expressed through a range of aggressions such as a motorcycleslipping in front of a shrine or mental and physical illnesses and even death.Although the acknowledgment of this force requires familiarity or a household-based connection, it can also affect impertinent strangers in the vicinity of a shrine.A well-known story in Shahbad describes a visit by a Tehsildar (the subdistrictrevenue officer), who contemptuously declared, “I don’t care for any devta [deity].”Disregarding the customary injunction to approach barefoot, the officer sat on ashrine with his shoes on. “His body froze! There and then the deity showed himthe proof of his power! The Tehsildar learned to show respect.”

In contrast, the aspect of contract involves more routine human–spirit rela-tions, maintained with specific shrines. Routine does not necessarily mean “fixed,”because a pact entails varying forms of give-and-take. In Shahbad the term for sucha transaction is dharam bolja, which I translate with respect to religious antiquityas do ut des in Latin, dadami se dehi mei in Sanskrit (“I give so that you may give”).Anthropologists have criticized “contractual” understandings of religious life as im-puting fixed “symmetrical” reciprocities (Willerslev 2009:696). Instead I suggestthat a crucial aspect of a contract is that it is ongoing, and periodically renegoti-ated. One such renegotiation underway in many Sahariya households during myfieldwork concerned animal sacrifice, the most routine offering to Thakur Baba inearlier generations, to which many now express aversion. “Why should someone’suntimely death [a Preet] cause another?” some said. Because the transaction itselfwas crucial to keep potentially troublesome household spirits in check, there wererenegotiations via spirit mediums to offer other forms of payment, such as regular

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visits on a fixed lunar date, shrine upkeep, or kanya pehran (the gift of clothes tounmarried girls, a meritorious act).

Through these forms of give-and-take a devotee might also exert force on adeity. For instance, if a deity has not arrived at a shrine to possess the medium,an auspicious number of five girls may be made to stand at the threshold of theshrine, each balancing a stone on her head. “Now he will have to come; our tapasya

[austerities] will bring him here.” A deity in turn might extract a service basedon an existing pact, manifesting himself in the obligated family through an illnessdiagnosed by a medium who conveys the spirit’s request. A cure may result fromthe fulfillment of the request or the creation of a new pact by seeking out a morepowerful shrine. Shrine hierarchies are not necessarily administratively configuredin popular Hinduism, as with the Chinese case above. More often they attainmythological expression through relations with “higher” gods, such as the classicalgod Shiva, also known as Bhootnath (Lord of Ghosts; Knipe 1989:125). In Shahbad,lower deities are said to be “under” the god Hanuman, Rama’s simian companionin the epic Ramayana. Every village in Shahbad has a Hanuman temple, the morepopular of which bear titles such as manshapoorna (wish-fulfilling) and sankatmochan

(crisis-resolving). According to most people, it is the lower deities who undertakethe tasks requested of a high deity like Hanuman.

This “theos” of divine hierarchies further alerts us to what Ann Stoler has called“gradated forms of sovereignty” (2008:193), a theme subdued in more omnipotentconceptions of power. In terms of gradations, Varuna and Mitra are the mostprominent among an entire class of beings, the Adityas, who further subdividethe functions of sovereignty, Bhaga (the distributor), Dhatr (the teacher), Daksa(intelligence) and so on (Dumezil 1988:81). With Thakur Baba, while he is notsubservient to any higher deity, even the most worshipful would call him a chote

devta (a smaller deity) with a relatively delimited region of sovereignty. Peoplein Shahbad often describe divine hierarchies by comparing them to governmentalones: “Your work is with the District Collector but your request goes to theTehsildar (subdistrict revenue officer).”

This comparison with the lower, more contestable reaches of sovereigntyhelped me understand an initially puzzling aspect of Thakur Baba, the occasional“rudeness” of his devotees. In the initial months of attending ritual possessions, I wassurprised when supplicants would express themselves forcefully: “Kar diyo kaammera!” [You better do my work!]. The deity may also retort, sometimes abusively,“Kaam kar madarchod, mehindar hai tu mera!” [Do my bidding, motherfucker, youare my servant!]. Overhearing this exchange with me was Ram Singh, a Sahariya

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boy who worked for my hosts Sankalp, an NGO. He had spent several years awayin a boarding school and was startled by these volleys of abuse. “What kind of god isit who has to speak like that? It is an insult to religion [dharam],” he whispered. Formost supplicants this manner of imperative speech is one among a range of possibleattitudes including prostration, cajoling, complaint, anger, gratitude, and so on.For spirit mediums, forceful speech is at the heart of their techniques. Often toexpel a spirit causing an illness one has to dominate it by exerting a greater force,either physically “beating” it or by compelling it to submit to a forceful incantation.Such competitions of force and dominance between humans and spirits would beimpossible at the higher reaches of deified sovereignty.

In view of these varying transactions, we might say that the “ambivalence of thesacred” is not randomly alternating malevolence and benevolence. Nor is it whollypredetermined by social consensus or “group affective states,” as in Durkheim’sdefinition (2001:307). Rather, the variability of these relations between differentthresholds of life, spirit and human, is better characterized as specific transactionsof force and contract, the bipolar aspects of sovereignty. We might ask further,although he is a “lower” deity, what is the source of Thakur Baba’s power overlife? Such power, I contend, is not simply a mirror of social or historical relationsof sovereignty, “peasants awed by imperial power,” as Wolf puts it. As far backas they could remember, village elders in Shahbad spoke of no direct lena-dena(give-and-take) with Rajputs. By contrast, the most immediate instantiation ofsovereign power in rural India for at least the last three centuries, the Patwari(village-level revenue collector), is not deified in any shape or form. Social powerdoes not necessarily translate into spiritual sovereignty. How then do we conceiveof human deification?

HUMAN SACRIFICE AND POWER OVER LIFE

In travel writing India is often described as having innumerable “folk” or“local” shrines. Studied more closely, such shrines for masculine deities are usuallyfor Vir warriors, or for Pir or Siddha ascetics, terms with a provenance withinand beyond Shahbad. Such shrines may take Hindu, Islamic, Buddhist, and Jainforms, with comparable requests for healing, familial assistance, and childbirth,or in negotiating relations between spirits belonging to different social groups orreligions. These overlaps are often described as “popular syncretism,” expressingan “inchoate pagan faith” said to be more fluid than modern census categories, forinstance, when communities identify themselves as “Hindu-Muslim” or “Hindu-Buddhist” (Nandy 1997:5). Rather than taking such identifications as necessarily

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a sign of religious cosmopolitanism, or of an inscrutably “inchoate paganism,” Isuggest that in such cases the contracts of birth, life and postdeath thresholds areless with a covenant (an expanded “descent” group) and more with locality-specifickin-based shrines such as Thakur Baba, a form of religious life that may allowfor multiple pacts, even with a deity from another religion. With modern censuscategories a contractual shift, say from a Hindu to a Muslim shrine begins to beconsidered a “conversion” (Eaton 1984:356). My interest is in tracing a resonancebetween these forms of deified power that is neither wholly inchoate nor entirelysyncretic.

What is the source of the power (over life) of a Vir such as Thakur Baba andPir or Siddha ascetic spirits if it is not “historical”? We return to Chakrabarty’squestion: how does the “rational” time of history differ from the “supernatural”time of gods? Among rational historicists, it has become common to gesturederisively to the “old ahistorical anthropology” or the “rarefied timelessness ofold anthropology” (Hansen and Stepputat 2006:296). Disputing their consensusI contend that the older studies of ancestor spirits, sacrifice, asceticism, and soon, tended toward what we might call the infrahistorical and the suprahistorical,

regions of life also in evidence here, which I claim as thresholds of varying vitality,temporality, and movement for the Vir and the Pir. I take the terms infrahistorical

and suprahistorical from an essay by Nietzsche on how to conceive of intensitiesof life distinct from the time of history (1997). The charge in Nietzsche’s termsis not to reject or deny history but to ascertain its relative value alongside theseother thresholds of life. According to Nietzsche, the infrahistorical plots “a relativelydelimited territory” (1997:120), instanced in our case in a localized weave of kin andproximate spirit and human relationships, not removed from but subsisting belowthe threshold of national-colonial histories. In contrast, the suprahistorical tendstoward the “transcendental elements of art and religion” (Nietzsche 1997:120).I will name human sacrifice as one such comparably transcendental element (an“elementary” form) of religious life. Comparability does not override difference.The “same” element may convey drastically different valences, as we will see withthe definition of sacrifice below. Consider, though, for a moment that an elementcomparable across certain religions (monotheistic, polytheistic, and tribal) is thesacrifice of a deified human/divine form, as in the dismemberment of Purusa-Prajapati in the Rig Veda or the sacrifice of Jesus that inaugurates Christianity.Alongside the sacrificial imperative runs the drive to find substitutes. A lamb inplace of a human is a substitution memorialized in several mythologies, includingthe story of Abraham.

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The Vir and Pir are human sacrifices without a substitution. The warriorand the ascetic express heightened thresholds of life, although in different forms.The difference, according to Nietzsche, is that the ascetic ideal turns violence“inwards” as self-sacrifice. (“Sacrifice yourself, not animals!” as Gandhi, a keymodern proponent of the ascetic ideal, famously said.) Rather than stressing theirdifference in life, the site-specific shrines of the Vir and the Pir express a comparablerelation to death. These shrines mark the spot where they died, as we are told, orin the case of Pirs, where they attained Samadhi or Chilla (the latter term morestrongly associated with Muslim ascetics), a heightened “blissful” threshold of life,also described as a “conquest of death” (Parry 1994). In the warrior’s death andthe ascetic’s passage over thresholds, their suprahistorical power emanates fromtheir status as human sacrifice. I should clarify, though, what I mean by the termsacrifice.

Perhaps the best-known thesis on human sacrifice is Rene Girard’s “surrogatevictim” argument, wherein an arbitrarily selected victim channels a group’s internalviolence (1977). It would be impossible to understand the warrior or the ascetic as“arbitrarily selected” victims who restore social unity. More fertile than this is theclassic definition of sacrifice by Hubert and Mauss, which: “consists in establishinga means of communication between the sacred and the profane worlds throughthe mediation of a victim, that is, of a thing that in the course of the ceremony isdestroyed” (1964:97). Let us transfigure this definition, not as a communicationbetween different “worlds” but as relations between varying thresholds of life.How are such relations enabled? Both definitions above assume that the sacrificialintermediary can be designated by the word victim. We might stress a differentpredicament. The revulsion to animal sacrifice discussed above is not an impulsepeculiar to Shahbad, nor is it necessarily an effect of “modernization.” In Semitic,Greek, and Hindu rituals, Hubert and Mauss tell us, “Excuses were made for theact, the death of the animal was lamented . . . the species was entreated not toavenge the wrong done to them” (1964:33). In Shahbad it is said that earlier animalsacrifices were not debased because “the animal of its own accord banged its headat the altar” (called moorphodi, or head bursting). Comparably, in Greek sacrifice,the animal’s “shudder” signaled its assent (Detienne 1989:10).

What is at stake here, morally, is the will of the sacrificial intermediary. Inthe case of the warrior and the ascetic, we cannot then describe them as sacrificialvictims. Nor, I contend, is this a “cult of violence” or an affirmation of “religioussuicide.” Rather, it is a form of heightened life combined with a mode of passageacross a threshold that all humans must cross, namely, death. The Vir’s and the

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Pir’s modes of passage are not self-annihilation but a will to heightened powerover life. Many seek to access this power not to communicate across “sacred andprofane worlds” but, rather, to enable their own journeys across thresholds, tobring the unborn to life, or to bring order to the lives of neighboring spirits.Contractual negotiation with these forces may require further intermediaries suchas spirit mediums, goats, or the consecrated ash from shrines called babhoot inShahbad, vibhuti in formal Hindi, a “regenerated remnant” (Knipe 1989:145).Thus, a particular type of death is linked to the regeneration and maintenance oflife.

Further clarification is necessary, because we often refer to a “willing” humansacrifice as a martyr. The variable valences of the word martyr decide the differencebetween a terrorist and a saint. Is Thakur Baba a “Hindu martyr”? Although peoplemay refer to him as “shaheed,” we might notice his distinctly terrestrial orientationlinked to familial life processes, rather than to otherworldly rewards. A theologicalabsence of heaven, in this case, allows for a continued connection with life, ratherthan a heroic flight into the beyond. This signals a different valence than thepersecuted anti-Roman rebel martyr of early Christianity (Bowersock 1995:66)or the range of configurations of the shaheed in later centuries with Islam (Cook2007), including the deified man on a horse such as Abu Ayyub whose tombis revered even in present day Istanbul, or the Turkish Baba Illyas said to haveascended to the heavens on a white horse, invoking Prophet Mohammed’s “nightjourney” in the Koran, astride the horse Buraq, who takes him to meet the otherAbrahamic prophets (Cook 2007:84). Should we conclude that Thakur Baba is“worldly” while these other horsemen are “otherworldly”? Much as this states adifference, the worldly–otherworldly dualism canonized by Max Weber (1963)undervalues the crucial tension of varying degrees between and within worlds,namely, thresholds of life.

We may notice resonances between Thakur Baba and the lower thresholds ofdeified life in Christianity and Islam. Describing the role of saintly martyr shrines inthe rise of Christianity, Peter Brown tells us that the most highly rated activity of theearly Christian church was the expulsion of weaker spirits (1981:108). The church’scures were characterized by “heavy judicial overtones . . . pitted against the powerof demons who spoke through the possessed human sufferer” (Brown 1981:108).This contest for and expression of power over life is what I am calling deifiedsovereignty. Comparably, networks of Pir, also called Wali (plural Awliya) shrineswere critical for the spread of Islam into South Asia (Eaton 1984:355). Wali (saint) isan Ottoman term for a provincial administrator, while Dargah (shrine) is a synonym

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for “court” (Eaton 1984:346). Rather than their “sameness,” I will stress a resonanttension between and within these religions. “Modernizing” Hinduism, ProtestantChristianity, and puritan Islam all turn against these lower thresholds of deified life.In Shahbad as elsewhere, representatives of the Hindu Right as well as the Left andliberal NGOs carry out educational campaigns against andha-vishwaas (superstition).The prime targets of such campaigns are lower level deities, at best “rationally”transfigured into loka-sanskriti (folk culture). How might this conflict be understoodin theological terms? What makes “higher” gods more “rational” than “lower” deities?Following Weber’s sociology of religion, puritan Islam and Protestant Christianityare often described as forms of “rationalization” (Weber 1963:151) or by a two-tiered division into “great” and “little” traditions, a framework subsequently usedfor various religions. Rather than increasing “greatness,” or “modernization,” Istress the contest between different degrees and thresholds of transcendence,such that a “rationalizing” puritan movement may in fact assume a more violentlyheightened degree of transcendent life such as heaven, or a threshold of secularizedtranscendence, such as the nation.

Returning to Thakur Baba, we might ask again, is he a “Hindu martyr”? Aswe saw above, politically right-leaning neoliterates in Shahbad assert “historical”commonsense, claiming that these were Hindus who died fighting Muslims. At anational level, Hindu right-wing groups often try to generate anti-Muslim senti-ment with incendiary invocations of medieval Islamic invaders marauding Hindupolities. A historical pacifier to this logic is that the warrior castes and tribes of northand central Indian Hinduism fought not for a sacred covenant but as contingentwar bands, as we saw with Kolff, fighting occasionally against other Rajputs, orwith the Afghans against the Mughals and vice versa. The minor definition of theRajput warrior bleeds into the major one. I will say that the word shaheed whenused to describe Thakur Baba as a “Hindu martyr,” imports an unfamiliar forceinto this spirit. This is not the force of “rationalization” but, rather, the conceptof the covenant in its contemporary form, as nationalism, a spirit quite foreignto Hinduism, administratively “international,” traveling across small neighboringkingdoms until very recently. This new valence only becomes viable with “histor-ical” education, the story of nations and states, in which suprahistorical elementsare transfigured, often into more debased forms. Today, as earlier, we can see thatmuch is at stake, politically and theologically, in the definition of sacrifice and itsrelation to life. Having understood, to some extent, the source of Thakur Baba’sdeified power, we can now ask how this power varies, a conceptual impossibilityin omnipotent ideas of sovereignty.

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CONCLUSION: WAXING AND WANING THRESHOLDS OF LIFE

Our imagination of power and life conveys the spirit that possesses us. Agam-ben’s concept of sovereign power and bare life perhaps exacerbated the gloomyscholarly zeitgeist of negative dialecticians who now picture us all as living inthe “post-9/11 era.” The problem is partly that Agamben, following a particu-lar reading of Benjamin, swings between the theological extremes of redemptionand catastrophe. Those of us who had not pinned our hopes on an extraordi-nary redemption in the first place are also not as keen now to hurl ourselvesinto the abyss. In a sense this is an invaluable problem for anthropologists toconsider, namely, our theologico-political evaluations of what the world is, orought to be. Agamben and the negative dialecticians are not “wrong.” Theirsis one way of viewing the world. I too could have gone to Shahbad and de-picted the Sahariyas, for instance, as “bare life,” or their relations with ThakurBaba as expressing “alienation.” Those close to Thakur Baba are mostly classi-fiable as the rural poor, but that is not the sum of their life, nor that of thisdeity.

Following Thakur Baba I have tried to offer a political theology of sovereigntyas relations of force and contract, arguing that deified power may subsist at varyinginfra- and suprahistorical thresholds of life. This is not to say that such powerover life is fixed or unchanging. The gods and spirits we have encountered arepartially mortal, with unpredictable lifespans. Which god is not mortal in thissense? The forces they exert may wax and wane and become lifeless. How dowe recognize signs of waxing or waning life? An abstract idea of modernity or asecular education does not necessarily result in the disenchantment of these lowerthresholds of deified life. I met innumerable schoolteachers, NGO and governmentemployees, and other self-professed moderns who could be possessed by ThakurBaba or at least participate in the weave of life in which one whispers, “This is hisarea.” Such whispers are not self-evidently “beliefs.” In hushed tones my researchassociate Gajanand would say, “I tell you from my heart, all this is andha-vishwaas

[superstition].” Then we would reach a spirit medium and Gajanand, a veteranperformer in uncountable “rural education and development” campaigns, wouldprostrate himself saying “Baba, I have been troubled for years. What can I do aboutmy household Preet?” “Unbelievers” may also sense the power of a threshold oflife. I was caught unprepared when I first heard the gote, a musical form associatedwith Thakur Baba. Accompanied by a dhaank (a ran ka baaja, or “war” drum), agroup of men sang from a supplicant woman’s perspective, conveying a childbirthrequest:

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O mere deva re, teri dhaakan kei dhamora mene ghare angana ri sun lai re . . .

[My deity, I heard the sound of your drum in my courtyard . . . ]O mere deva, mere Thakur Baba, din ugtai mene puriya karaiya chattisopakavaan . . .

[My deity, my Thakur Baba, since dawn I have been cooking flatbreads andsweets to offer you . . . ]Deva re, mere Maharaje, mujhse devraniya jethaniya nai re, binne dhar laumero banjhutia naam . . .

[My deity, my king, my sister-in-laws tease me, they’ve given me the nickname“barren woman” . . . ]Mere Deva re, teri saranan gayi re, aava ki pataaiya raakh diyo, mere dinband-haiya re . . .

[My deity, I beg you to help, keep my respect, I fall at your feet, friend of theunfortunate . . . ]

It was less the lyrics and more the extended tones and the deliberate rhythm,slowly increasing in intensity that I found nerve wracking from some unidentifiableaffect. Sensing my goose bumps Gajanand whispered, “I hope you are not goingto get possessed.” The spirit medium who had been observing me closely laughed.“It’s nothing now,” he said. “You should have seen my grandfather. When ThakurBaba came to him, he would roar. Even the peacocks in the surrounding forestwould call back. At that time people knew how to sing a gote. Everyone would bein tears.” This was not mere nostalgia. I too could sense these shifts in intensity,for example in the generation following Gajanand’s, who would mock the exaltedmelodramatic tones of the gote, even as they quickly bowed their heads by a fewdegrees when passing a shrine for Thakur Baba. From the deity’s perspective,we might call this a shift in his quality of life. Rather than “modernity,” forms ofdecline are better diagnosed by heightened attentiveness to varying thresholds oflife, waning intensities immanent to a milieu. People in Shahbad say, “Nowadaysspirit mediums are less damdaar [forceful].” In anthropological physics it is hard toquantify subtle shifts of force, changes by thresholds and degrees. The world endswith a whimper?

Life however does not end, more often it morphs. Forces wax and wane, andcontracts are renegotiated. Who knows what place Thakur Baba will find in theoncoming dispensation? Old ghosts may show up unexpectedly in forms that mayor may not do justice to their earlier thresholds of life. On one occasion I arrivedto find a commotion on my host NGO campus. A young teacher had fainted after

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seeing a vision of a man on a white horse. A senior female colleague of hers latertold me that she is “basically sexually frustrated.” In many parts of India and abroad,a groom in a Hindu wedding is made to dress up in princely attire and sit astride ahorse. Uncomfortably perched on a hired pony most grooms cut a comical figure.And yet this overlap of martial and marital imagery still seems apt to so many toexpress their passage across a threshold and the hope for the continuation of life.Maybe for Thakur Baba’s afterlife, this is as good as it gets. Are we disappointed?Our political theologies prompt our view of life. Strangely enough, in my scholasticneck of the woods, such is the view of life (or is it only a mode of feigning gravitas?)that it is harder for now to prompt a smile than it is to confirm a global catastrophe.What spirits possess us? Incited by a warrior god I wanted to battle this calamitouscompulsion. So that at least for an instant I could say with the Santals, “I rebelledbecause Thakur Baba told me to.”

ABSTRACTBuilding on recent anthropological discussions on sovereignty and life, I examine thepolitical theologies of Thakur baba, a minor sovereign deity in central India. Howmight we understand spirits and deities as cohabitants with the living? Following GillesDeleuze, I set out the idea of “varying thresholds of life.” How do we conceptualizerelations of power between these thresholds? Engaging Thakur baba’s capacity to harmand to bless, I show how this sacred ambivalence may be understood as an expressionof deified sovereignty. In contrast to Agamben and Schmitt’s more absolutist politicaltheology, I set out a “bipolar” concept of sovereignty as varying relations of force andcontract, a tension I find best named by the Vedic mythological pair of Mitra-Varuna.Rather than a direct mirroring of social or historical sovereignty, I locate Thakur baba’svitality in a weave of kin and spirit relations, and in his status as a human sacrifice.In conclusion I analyze how these deified powers might wax and wane. [sovereignty,concepts of life, ambivalence of the sacred, ancestral spirits, sacrifice, politicaltheologies, popular religion, Hinduism, Rajasthan (India)]

NOTESAcknowledgment. The research for this article was funded by the IDRF Program of the Social

Science Research Council. Veena Das, William Connolly, and Hent deVries, from their very differentroutes, animated my interest in the concept of sovereignty and were patient and encouraging listenerswhen I tried to find my own way. Sylvain Perdigon first pointed me to Dumezil, and Ravi Sundaram,Rana Dasgupta, and Naveeda Khan were generous and helpful readers of initial drafts. Charlie Piotput in a labor of love, much beyond the call of official editorial duties, to help sharpen this piece towhatever extent I could. Lastly, this article stems from, even if it does not explicitly express, thedepth of gratitude and affection I feel for my hosts in Shahbad, the NGO Sankalp, and the people Icame to know and learn from in the course of fieldwork.

1. For an account of the “return” of the concept of sovereignty in anthropology, see Hansen andStepputat 2006.

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2. According to Schmitt’s own description, his “decisionism” presupposes an absolutism, anomnipotent God recast as an omnipotent lawgiver, under whose jurisdiction, “the exception isanalogous to a miracle” (1985:36).

3. In the book project based on this ethnographic material, Gods and Grains: Political Theologies ofPopular Hinduism, I elaborate the Mitra-Varuna concept of sovereignty as a way of engaging var-ious dimensions of spiritual and material power, state capacities and incapacities, and intercasteinequalities and modes of aspiration in Shahbad.

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Editors’ Notes: Cultural Anthropology has published a number of articles onsovereignty, including Jessica R. Cattelino’s “The Double Bind of American IndianNeed-Based Sovereignty” (2010), Arzoo Osanloo’s “The Measure of Mercy: IslamicJustice, Sovereign Power, and Human Rights in Iran” (2006), and Jessica Winegar’s“Cultural Sovereignty in a Global Art Economy: Egyptian Cultural Policy and theNew Western Interest in Art from the Middle East” (2006).

Cultural Anthropology has also published articles on concepts of life. See, for example,Mette N. Svendsen’s “Articulating Potentiality: Notes on the Delineation of theBlank Figure in Human Embryonic Stem Cell Research” (2011), Filip De Boeck’s“Inhabitating Ocular Ground: Kinshasa’s Future in the Light of Congo’s SpectralUrban Politics” (2011), and Thomas Pearson’s “On the Trail of Living ModifiedOrganisms: Environmentalism within and against Neoliberal Order” (2009).

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the headless horseman of central india: sovereignty at varying thresholds of life

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