The theopolitics of protest: Martyrdom in the Gujjar Andolan,the army and the epic

I Introduction

Martyr memorials in the form of statues of the fallen soldier dot the landscape in Dausa and Karauli districts in Rajasthan. These memorials are of jawans ¹ of the Gujjar caste who have historically been recruited to the army from this region. Similar martyr memorials are coming up, or are planned, for Gujjars who were killed by the police during the 2006 and 2007 Gujjar Andolan (protests). Gujjars, led by retired army officers and jawans, protested against the failure of the state government to uphold its promise of including them in the Scheduled Tribe (ST) List. Inclusion in the list would provide these groups with access to seats reserved in higher education and government jobs, along with the opportunity to avail themselves of a number of protective and development policies and legislation. During the andolan, Gujjars had blocked railway tracks and closed off important highway points. The police had opened fire and killed 72 Gujjars, claiming that the situation was extremely volatile because violent Gujjars had destroyed public property and set fire to a police station.

Dayal Singh, a retired jawan, explained the importance of these statues in commemorating the lives of fellow Gujjars. He said that they had sacrificed their lives in the army. Further, his own brother was a shaheed (martyr) of the Gujjar Andolan. ‘My brother had no initial fear. But he was an unarmed civilian. He did not know that he should have lain on the ground when bullets were being fired’. His brother was shot at during the Gujjar Andolan and was dead by the time they took him to the hospital.

From the hospital, Dayal Singh and other leaders decided to take the dead bodies of the martyred Gujjars and lay them out on the highway at the protest sites. For 17 days, the bodies of the martyrs were covered with white sheets and placed on ice ferried in jeeps by people to ensure they would not rot. At the site, hundreds of thousands of Gujjars conducted night-long recitations of stories from the Devnarayan epic. Dayal Singh said that the virta (bravery) embodied in the epic gave them the courage to continue the andolan.

Gujjar soldiers like Dayal Singh are employed in the army usually at the rank of jawans or foot soldiers and as non-commissioned officers, which usually means that they can be promoted up to a certain rank—Subedar or Subedar Major. After retirement they return to their villages to tend to their fields or obtain employment as guards or watchmen. Retired Gujjar jawans play a crucial role in the social and political life of the village and have participated in the Gujjar Andolan. Many of the leaders of the Gujjar Andolan were retired soldiers.

Dayal Singh’s narratives of martyrdom in the army, the andolan and the epic are dialogic in the sense that they proffer a synthesising account of narratives of fear and bravery in the army, for example, his recounting of his brother’s killing in the andolan and the ways in which virta in the two wars of the Devnarayan epic inspired villagers to continue with the andolan (Bakhtin 1981).

The multiplicity of voices in this narrative of martyrdom is heard in the time of the event, the everyday and in mythic time. Here, I focus on how martyrdom in the army and the Devnarayan epic inspired the events of the Gujjar Andolan. I take the narrative of the martyred bodies that were laid out for 17 days in the Gujjar Andolan while men and women recited the Devnarayan epic as a starting point to prompt a series of observations and questions that I will address in this article. How do Gujjar men like Dayal Singh relate martyrdom in the army that is sanctioned by law to martyrdom in the Gujjar Andolan in the context of what the state considers the illegalities of ‘crowd’ protest? How do narratives of martyrdom become available for Gujjars who did not serve in the army? In what ways do epics like Devnarayan do the reparative work of the everyday that enable people to make sense of martyrdom in the army and andolan? How does martyrdom produced at sites of protest and the everyday lead to particular formations of caste belonging?

I follow the dialogical manner in which men like Dayal Singh recounted martyrdom in the army, epic and andolan to express their fears, vulnerability and also their aspirations. I argue that it is in such vulnerability—most visible in the seeming abjectness of the bodies of martyrs laid out for 17 days at the site of the protest—that the political life of caste is produced.

II The theopolitics of protest

Carl Schmitt (1922) has famously said that ‘all significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts’ (Schmitt 1922: 36). His work on political theology underscores the view that it is the sovereign decision that decides the exception at the heart of political life. For Schmitt ‘the exception in jurisprudence is analogous to the miracle in theology’ (ibid.). Schmitt’s neo-Hobbesian interpretation of the state as the deus ex machina vests the state with ‘magical properties because of its ultimate control of violence and its capacity to authorize (arbitrary) definitions of the normal, and to decide on the suspension of the law in a state of exception’ (Hansen 2008: 1). ² While there have been many interlocutors of Carl Schmitt’s conception of political theology (Thiem 2013), recent anthropological interventions into the concept have examined the privileged position of Abrahamic monotheistic traditions in Carl Schmitt’s work that led him to ‘posit a “decisionist” totalizing authority’ (McAllister and Napolitano 2021; Singh 2012: 386). For Singh (2012), these interventions call for a more pluralised sense of the theos. In the context of Catholicism in the Americas, McAllister and Napolitano (2020) write that,

[Theopolitics] asks not only how theological categories permeate everyday life beyond the Schmittian framework of secularization, but also how these categories participate in long histories of the body, affects, and material religion, and how these histories are lived in the constitution of people and commons. (McAllister and Napolitano 2020: 7)

In the context of Christianity in the Americas, McAllister and Napolitano discuss how incarnation (rather than embodiment) is the ‘hinge joining elastic performances of sovereignty to the substance of politics’ (ibid.: 6). They draw on Kantorowitcz’s study in which the king in the European Middle Ages had two bodies—one of the mortal body, that is subject to illness and decay, and the other of the mystical body of the office that enables succession. The work of incarnation grounded ‘both the office of the king and that of the people who were incorporated in the body politic through the king’s participation in the divine’ (ibid.).

McAllister and Napolitano (2020) draw on the ways in which Eric L. Santner (2011) conceives of the flesh. Santner writes that Kantorowitcz anticipated what would be a later historical development, ‘the “horizontal” or democratic dissemination of the dynamics of the King’s Two Bodies into the domain of “popular sovereignty” and so into everyman’ (ibid.: 44). It is with this dissemination that Santner writes about biopolitics:

[It] assumes its particular urgency and expansiveness in modernity because what is at issue in it is not simply the biological life and health of the populations but the “sublime” life-substance of the People, who, at least in principle, become the bearers of sovereignty, assume the dignity of the prince. (ibid.: xi–xii)

For Santner this ‘sublime’ life substance is the flesh that is ‘spectral yet visceral’. ³ Santner shows how the stripping of the social in the wretchedness of statelessness, as conceived by Hannah Arendt and Giorgio Agamben’s notion of bare life, misses ‘a bit of the flesh of the social bond itself, the stuff that the body of the sovereign was formerly charged with figuratively—and often theatrically—incorporating’ (ibid.: 58). Santner argues that the notion of bare life is not merely zoe (bare life) deprived from bios (qualified life), but that destitution and exposure is a portal to our ‘minimal office’ as political beings.

In this article, I draw on Santner’s ideas to show how the laying out of martyred bodies for 17 days during the Gujjar Andolan is emblematic of the ‘spectral yet visceral’ flesh and attempt to unpack its dimensions. In the next section, I take the unofficial war cry of the Gujjar Company of the Rajput regiment, which refers to a character in the Devnarayan epic, to spotlight the military and religious practices, as well as the co-production of the military and the religious that led to the formation of such a war cry. I then examine how martyrdom becomes available for all Gujjars and how the spectre of martyrdom and the regeneration of life in terms of the Devnarayan epic characterises the peaceful modes of everyday life. In the next section, I return to the vulnerability and exposure expressed by Gujjars in the context of the andolan. The recitation of the Devnarayan epic in the context of such vulnerability indicates the recuperation of the social in Santner’s terms rather than a reduction to bare life. Finally, I examine the love for one’s caste that is produced during the andolan, and the dissemination of the flesh of the sovereign into the bodies of the martyred and the living at the site of the andolan.

III ‘Bhonna Baba ki jai’: Gujjars in the Indian Army and the Devnarayan epic

The majority of retired Gujjar soldiers who I spoke to in Dausa were recruited to the Rajput Regiment, which consisted of Gujjar companies and Rajput companies. Retired Gujjar soldiers told me how they created an ethos for Gujjar companies that was distinct from the Rajput companies. For example, one of the central features of the regimental system in India is that each regiment has its own battle slogan or war cry that is chanted at the time of battle. The war cry for the Rajput Regiment is ‘Bol Bajrang Bali ki jai’, which is translated as ‘victory to Bajrang Bali’. Bajrang Bali is the martial persona of Hanuman the monkey God who figures centrally in the textual epic known as The Ramayana. The Gujjar Company’s war cry is ‘Bhonna Baba ki jai’ or ‘a salute to Bhonna Baba’. Bhonna Baba is a character in the Devnarayan epic.

The regimental system of the Indian Army was developed in the colonial period where regiments were raised on the basis of caste, ethnicity or region. Colonial officers took steps to create a distinct identity for the regiment by providing the regiment with its own centre and establishing colours (or flags), uniforms, a motto and a war cry for each regiment (Cohen 2001; Streets 2004). Kate Imy (2019) examines the interactional histories (van der Veer 2001) by which, for example, the British Indian Army viewed diverse beliefs and practices through monotheistic frameworks to make them more legible to the Indian army (Imy 2019: 11). In one chapter, she shows how the British Indian Army considered Khalsa Sikhs most ‘pure’ and put them through a course of instruction that included wearing the so-called five Ks including a kirpan—‘sometimes defined as a sword or dagger’ (ibid.: 20). ⁴

Along with the regimental system, the British Indian Army recruited soldiers on the basis of the martial race theory. Colonial officers believed that there was a biological basis of ranking different races in India where people who lived in cold climatic zones had physical and social characteristics that made them better suited to military service and war. Knowledge about different groups of people who were categorised as martial races was systematically collected, and by the end of the 19^th century, colonial officers initiated the handbooks project. Cole and Christie (2012) published a handbook on the Jats, Ahirs, and Gujjars in Rajputana, what broadly constitutes the present state of Rajasthan, to justify the recruitment of these groups into the army. The writers of the handbook outline what can be listed as the major character traits and social practices pertaining to Gujjars, namely, that they resisted domination by others, they were good ‘sturdy’ farmers and herdsmen, and they possessed a marked degree of courage.

The regimental system and the martial race theory were continued in post-colonial India. There has been an ongoing debate in the Defence Ministry, with one side pushing for raising more single-caste regiments and the other side calling for abolishing recruitment on the principle of class and caste, which is seen as undemocratic and detrimental to the fostering of a patriotic spirit among soldiers (Cohen 2001: 189; Wilkinson 2015). On the other hand, senior officers attributed military victories to single-caste regiments. The Indian government finally made a policy decision to terminate the creation of new single-caste regiments, and the new regiments that it raised were mixed-caste regiments (Cohen 1990; Gautam 2008). However, the old established regiments continue to recruit soldiers from particular castes, ethnicities or regions on the principle of the martial race theory. The army, therefore, has three types of infantry regiments: ‘pure’ or single caste, ‘mixed company’ with two or three ‘classes’ that are segregated at the company level, and regiments that are ‘totally mixed’ (Cohen 1990: 188).

‘Bhonna Baba ki jai’—the unofficial war cry of the Gujjar Company in the Rajput Regiment—emerges from colonial histories of the regimental system and the martial race theory as well as the everyday circulations of stories from the Devnarayan epic. Scholars have shown how the ‘oral narrative’ (Malik 2005) of Devnarayan can be seen as a ‘martial epic’ concerned with power, social obligation and social unity while focusing on themes of revenge, regaining of lost land or restoring lost rights (Blackburn et al. 1989: 5).

An 83-year-old bard spent almost three hours recounting what he said was a very basic outline of the main narrative, which has various plots and sub-plots. The broad themes of the epic, as they pertain to this article, involve the 24 Bagaravat brothers, of whom Savai Bhoj and his wife Sadu Mata figure most prominently. The 24 brothers were given a boon whereby they would have unending wealth for 12 years, after which both their wealth and life would come to an end. As the fame and wealth of the 24 brothers spread, they became friends with a Rajput chief, referred to as the Rana. The brothers started living up their wealth, consuming large quantities of alcohol in the process. As a result of their debauchery, the female Goddess Shakti took on the task of destroying the Bagaravat brothers. She took the form of Jaimati who caused a deep rift between the 24 Bagaravat brothers and the Rana, which eventually resulted in a battle. The brothers fought bravely but were defeated and killed by the Rana. Sadu Mata then practised penance in the mountains. Due to a previous boon, Bhagvan (God) came to her as Devnarayan. Sadu Mata raised Devnarayan in her parents’ home. When Devnarayan came of age, he found out about his father’s defeat at the hands of the Rana. Devnarayan went back to his father’s house to take revenge upon the Rana. On the way, he reunited with his cousins, one of whom is called Bhonna Baba. They were able to defeat the Rajput in the second battle of the epic.

While ‘Bhonna Baba ki jai’ is an unofficial war cry of the Gujjar Company, unlike the kirpan that was officially used by the British Indian Army, it points to the interactional histories that enable Gujjars to draw on local resources to make sense of the demands of the regimental system and the martial race theory. These interactional histories enable the dialogism between the army, epic and andolan, which I turn to next.

IV The headless hero across time: Martyrdom and the regeneration of life

A group of six men narrated different aspects of the Devnarayan story in order to explain Gujjar virta. Among them were Sangram Singh, an ex-serviceman who is now the block president of the Gujjar Mahasabha (caste council), and Chunni Lal, a patwari (who oversees land records) and the owner of the house where we had gathered. They recounted the details of the first battle in the Devnarayan epic between the 24 Bagaravat brothers and the Rana’s armies.

The image of the Bagaravat brothers who kept fighting without a head, without eyes, inspired Sangram Singh’s sacrifice of his family life, his farming and his own physical well-being during the war as in the andolan.

The ‘berserk hero’ (Harlan 2003: 16) who continues fighting a battle even after his head has been slain off his body is a recurrent and powerful theme in martial epics, stories and songs in Rajasthan (Harlan 2003; Singh 2012). Lindsay Harlan (2003) writes that these heroes are called jhunjharji in Mewar (the former princely state comprising districts in Southern Rajasthan) and bhomiyaji in Marwar (the erstwhile princely state comprising districts in Central and Northern Rajasthan). The headless hero dies an extremely violent death while ‘striving to achieve his goal of revenge, justice, or reunion with a loved one’ (Harlan 2003: 15).

How did these men connect the martyrdom of the Gujjar Andolan that demanded ST status for reservations to educational institutions and government jobs to martyrdom in war that is associated with aims of conquest, territory and nation? How did Chunni Lal and Sangram Singh understand the extremely violent death of the Bagaravat brothers as a good death and one which they may aspire to in their narrative of sacrifice? In what ways does such death lead to the regeneration of life and make possible more peaceful modes of life such as domesticity and ritual as well as the reform of community?

Bloch and Parry (1982) distinguish between a good death and a bad death. A good death is one of a man who ‘having fulfilled his duties on this earth, renounces his body (as the ascetic has earlier renounced his) by dying at the right place and the right time, and by making of it a sacrifice to the gods’ (ibid.: 16). A bad death is as follows:

[The] death of the person who is caught short, his body still full of excrement, and his duties unfinished. It is the death of one whose youthfulness belies the likelihood of conscious and voluntary renunciation of life, or of one whose body is contaminated by a disease which makes it unfit as a life-creating sacrifice. (ibid.)

Bloch and Parry also note that a good death promises the regeneration and renewal of the world for the living. Harlan (2003) shows how for the Rajputs (warrior castes), death in battle is a duty (dharm) that is preferred over dying when old. Further, the hero chooses his death when he goes to battle. He becomes an ascetic by wearing a saffron turban that signifies his ‘renunciation of life (and women) in the field of battle’ (ibid.: 117).

For Harlan, the headless hero is beyond life and death (2003: 15). Death is absolute when the atman (inner self) of the deceased leaves the body during a cremation ritual (Harlan 2003; Parry 1995). In the case of the jhunjharji, the atman has been liberated from the body, yet the body has not fallen (Harlan: 2003: 15). Harlan says that this is made apparent through the image of the lotus that often takes the place of the jhunjharji’s head. The lotus image also enables us to understand how Harlan, going beyond Parry’s analysis of the categories of a good death and bad death, considers the headless hero’s death as standing for the idea of perfection. Such perfection is also instanced by the way the jhunjharji finds moksh or liberation from reincarnation and is deified.

To further understand how the headless hero dies a good death, I return to the story of the Bagaravat brothers in the Devnarayan epic. Just before the battle between the 24 brothers and the Rana’s armies, Jaimati, the Bagaravat brothers’ wife, reveals her true form as the Goddess. She promises to accompany the brothers to battle if they fight the Rana one at a time and sacrifice themselves by offering their heads to her. They agree and, as mentioned, all of them are killed, but continue fighting with their heads slain off. Once they all fall, the Goddess assumes her true terrifying form on the battlefield surrounded by slain soldiers and dripping with blood, and she strings a necklace of the Bagaravat brothers’ heads. The heroes’ death can be interpreted as self-sacrifice since the heroes acquiesce to the Goddess’s demands. Malik (1999) likens these deaths to the ritual symbolism of offerings or dan, an image that he says can also be found in the epics of Tejaji and Pabuji ‘whose heroes both fulfil the Goddess’s demands to the point of destroying themselves’ (ibid.: 240).

Malik (1999) draws on Bloch and Parry’s (1982) conception of a good death as the regeneration of life. Focusing on the Bagaravat brothers’ death that leads to the birth and incarnation of God as Devnarayan, he says that a creative act follows a violent death. Malik focuses on three other plots in the story to show that a violent death is not an end but ‘a point in a cycle of transmutations and transformations’ through which the ‘goods of life’—‘children, prosperity and fame, and divinity itself are to be churned out’ (Malik 1999: 239).

Beliefs that the violent death of the headless hero leads to a sense of well-being are recurrent. Harlan (2003) discusses how Rajput women’s songs invite the headless hero—who previously gave up his land, wife and children to go into battle—back to inaugurate auspicious occasions. These songs suggest how the hero’s sacrifice makes possible fertility, both agricultural and human, sexuality and maternity for women. Similarly, in the context of his work with people of different castes in Central Rajasthan, Singh discusses the ‘thresholds of life’ associated with the headless horseman deity, Thakur Baba. The thresholds that ‘the living have with their initiations, births, marriages and deaths’ are marked by the ritualised presence of Thakur Baba (Singh 2012: 392). Both Harlan and Singh suggest the conflation of past times of heroic death with the present. Such temporality enables deities (including the headless hero) to cohabit with the living.

The Gujjars I met with understood that the death of martyrs must be meaningful for the living. This became clear to me when I spoke with Ajay at the Devnarayan Temple in Dausa. Ajay is studying in a college in Dausa and is staying in a hostel attached to the temple premises. In the context of a conversation about his education, he said, ‘So many Gujjars sacrificed their lives in the andolan so that we could study and have a better life. It is our duty to work hard’. Ajay spoke of how the martyrdom of Gujjars in the andolan inspires Gujjar youth to well-being in terms of education and progress. Here, we see an extension of Harlan and Singh’s ideas about how violent death portrayed in the epics leads to the regeneration of life in the multiple ways in which headless deities, who officiate at auspicious occasions of birth, marriage and children, also affect other aspects of well-being.

The septuagenarian Ram Singh, who is also a member of the Devnarayan Committee, which is in charge of the Devnarayan Temple, described how the priests of the Devnarayan Temple officiate at rituals during auspicious occasions, including rites of passage. In recent decades, the Devnarayan Committee has also undertaken the work of samaj sudhar (social reform). This is necessary, he explained, because Gujjars are inclined to great extravagance ‘from the time of the Bagaravat brothers who spent their wealth on debauchery’. He dwelt upon how Gujjars today spend vast amounts of money on the feast following the death of a family member and on mayra ceremonies (an extended form of dowry) during marriage. The Devnarayan Committee has attempted to reform these practices. During night-long recitations of the Devnarayan epic, the Devnarayan Committee explains to villagers that having to sell their land to enable such practices ultimately benefits the moneylender who gains the most from the feast and mayra. The committee also works to ensure education, particularly girls’ education. Often, education in villages is not adequate, and villagers are reluctant to send their girls to other villages, kasbas (small town) or cities to study.

Ram Singh drew attention to the view that ‘Devnarayan develops pahachaan’. A straightforward translation of the word ‘pahachaan’ is identity, but in my interactions with Ram Singh and in his use of the term, he conveyed to me that it also means the well-being of a community. Pahachaan involves participating both in aspects of events that matter and the everyday, including attending panchayat (village council) meetings for dispute resolution where rules and norms of the community were constantly worked out; choosing the best candidate during elections; attending weddings; practices of food and drink and various aspects of conviviality; and taking a stand on norms about the intimacy of married couples, including when those norms may be broken. As an integral part of pahachaan, the Devnarayan epic has both a direct and spectral presence through events and the everyday. In the next section, I focus on Vijay Singh’s narrative expounding the feelings of vulnerability and fear during the state violence that accompanied the Gujjar Andolan. I proceed to argue that the recitations of the Devnarayan epic in the course of the andolan enabled a recuperation of the social through the troubled times.

V ‘Here we have only kurta pajama’: Witnessing martyred bodies and the recuperation of the social

Vijay Singh served with the Indian Army Corps of the Engineers, a mixed-caste regiment, and took voluntary retirement at the rank of Subedar. After 26 years of army service, he had enough savings to pool in his money with his brothers in order to establish a hotel and restaurant outside Patoli village on the Jaipur–Agra highway. This was one of the sites where people blocked the highway during the Gujjar Andolan in 2007.

Vijay Singh told me about how his Corps had been attached to different regions of India: He said, ‘You really feel like Hindustan is one. There are people from Andhra Pradesh, Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Assam, and Punjab’. Friendships back home, Vijay Singh noted, were more difficult to establish: ‘If there is a Gujjar bhai (brother), I might not be in touch with him because he is too close’. He explained that one has too many obligations toward one’s own people; for example, if they ask you for money and you do not give it, then the relationship breaks. ‘However, vis-a-vis the Kerala folk, there is no such obligation and no such expectation’. He remarked, ‘If the facilities of telephone and mobile had existed when I retired, then all of Hindustan would have been in my compound’.

I sat with Vijay Singh in the compound of his hotel where people had camped during the andolan. He recreated the events of the andolan by pointing out specific locations in the vicinity where people had gathered, the police had come and where the killings took place. At that time, Vijay Singh provided water and other facilities to the extent that he could. We walked over to the highway outside his compound where hundreds of thousands of Gujjars gathered and blocked the road for seven days. He pointed toward the horizon on the other side of the road where a large meeting had been held to determine the later course of action. Shortly after this meeting, the police used tear gas, and fired at and killed Gujjar youth. Vijay Singh said that the bodies of the shaheed were laid out at the site of the andolan. At first, Gujjar leaders thought of holding a mass cremation at the site, but later they decided to send the bodies back home. Vijay Singh noted, ‘The army made a policy of sending the bodies of martyred soldiers back to their villages’. He said that he still thinks about those days at night and cannot sleep for hours. ‘I remember it even more than the difficulties I had to face in the army. In the army, we had weapons and a uniform; there were all kinds of safeguards. Here, we have only kurta pajama [a loose shirt and pyjamas]’. Vijay Singh described the fear and vulnerability experienced by Gujjars during the andolan by contrasting it with the safeguards provided by the army, which had the backing of state law.

I stayed at the compound through the afternoon and talked to people about stories from the Devnarayan epic, listened in on conversations about the upcoming parliamentary elections from people on the campaign trail and watched on as American college students stopped for a snack break on their way from Jaipur to Agra. Later in the evening, I discussed his army experiences again with Vijay Singh and asked whether, given his happy experience of friendship while serving in a mixed-caste regiment, all regiments should be mixed. Vijay Singh replied that the Engineering Corps was a supporting force and, while there could be friends in a supporting force, when it came to fighting, there was no place for friendship. ‘There must be blood relations’. He said that when one fought along with one’s jaat (or caste mates), then each person could potentially be someone you knew: ‘your father’s sister’s son or your wife’s father’s elder brother’s son, in a sense they could all be blood relations’. He continued:

If it was a friend, he would see the blood and flee, then he will come and cry with you after the andolan because his friend was killed. If it is a blood relation, your blood boils when he is killed, and you will want to take revenge. Your life does not matter, and you will face any amount of firing.

Vijay Singh began talking about how the killing of blood relations evokes retaliatory action during war and explained how sentiments of anger and revenge were similarly produced during the andolan. In the end, it was unclear whether he was talking about war or the andolan.

Both Dayal Singh and Vijay Singh had witnessed the deaths of Gujjar civilians and their bodies laid out during the andolan. By displaying the bodies at the site of the andolan, the Gujjars were seeking to transform the killing of civilians by signifying a bad death as a good death. In her work on Greek mourning rituals, Nadia Seremetakis (1991) shows how the role that women perform in witnessing and lamenting death is in contrast to a bad death that is met with silence and the absence of kin. Agamben (2002) writes about how there are two words for ‘witness’ in Latin. The first word, testis, signifies the person who, in a trial or lawsuit between two rival parties, is in the position of the third party. The second word, superstes, designates a person who has lived through something, who has experienced an event from beginning to end, and can therefore bear witness to it. Gujjars in the andolan are the superstes, the witnesses who could have potentially been the ones martyred. Vijay Singh’s references to being unarmed, wearing a kurta pajama rather than a uniform and facing police firing reveals the witness as the one who in participating is also offering himself for sacrifice.

Vijay Singh gestured toward military funerals, which call for the cool detached witness as the testis. In ancient Athens, the epitaphios logos (the funeral oration to the fallen citizen-soldier) was a ‘symbolic manifestation of the democratic polis’ (Loraux 1998: 19). In the rituals that concerned the burying of the dead, all economic and social distinctions between the fallen were supposed to be abolished. Loraux shows how the moment of the funeral oration reduces citizens to biological life.

In her ethnography of militarism and mourning in Pakistan, Maria Rashid (2020) describes the management of grief of the families of martyred soldiers who are taught over several generations to willingly sacrifice their kin for the nation. Men carefully monitor women’s mourning in the deliberate and precise ritual of military funerals in villages. The vaen (a Punjabi mourning ritual) is discouraged and women are told to recite namaz while civilian men, who are supposedly more in control of their emotions, participate with soldiers in the military funeral procession and burial. The management of grief expands to the national level during the Youm-e-Shuhada, the Martyrs’ Day, in which the immediate audience represents ‘the feminized, weak nation in need of protection from the stoic, more controlled, masculine family’, which sends their men to war and represents the institution of the military (ibid.: 42).

Bodies are quickly buried in both Loraux’s description of the epitaphios logos in ancient Greece and in Maria Rashid’s portrayal of military mourning at the local and national level in contemporary Pakistan. ⁵ Further, the rituals described by Loraux and Rashid show that at the moment of military mourning, the orientation is toward sacrifice for the nation above all else. In Loraux’s terms, at the moment of military mourning, there is a stripping of the social so that subjects can be made into citizens anew.

The ritual of mourning during the Gujjar Andolan involved laying out the bodies of martyred Gujjars for 17 days and reciting the Devnarayan epic. Dayal Singh had said that virta in the Devnarayan epic gave Gujjars the courage to continue with the andolan. The Devnarayan epic depicts martyrdom and the regeneration of life and, as discussed earlier, Ram Singh indicated that recitations of the Devnarayan epic accompany injunctions to community reform as well as inspiring everyday formations of pahachaan (both in terms of identity and well-being). Reciting the Devnarayan epic at the site of the andolan transforms a bad death, in terms of the killing of civilians (and young lives cut short), to a good death by inculcating the fortitude to continue with the andolan, gesturing to pahachaan and to the aspirations accompanying reservations that the andolan signifies, and hence provides the conditions for the regeneration of life.

By reciting the Devnarayan epic at the site of the andolan, we see a recuperation of the social in the form of an auguring of well-being when Gujjars were faced with state violence. By comparing the mourning in the Gujjar Andolan with military funerals described by Loraux and Rashid, I do not seek to underscore a stripping of the social in the epitaphios logos of ancient Greece (although Loraux makes precisely this argument) and in the military funerals in contemporary Pakistan. Indeed, Rashid shows how local sentiments of grief seep into the military rituals of mourning. Rather, what I want to forefront is that the display of the martyred bodies reflects the ‘spectral yet visceral’ dimensions of the flesh that Santner describes. The seeming abjectness—the destitution and exposure—becomes the site in which the political, particularly in the form of caste belonging, is produced. I elaborate the argument by turning to this form of caste belonging by drawing on my interlocutors’ distinction between kin and friend.

VI ‘The Gujjar Andolan was for love’: Friendship, love, and sacrifice

A leader of the Gujjar Andolan, who had risen in the ranks of the army, and who I will call Phool Singh, explained to me the reason he participated in the andolan: ‘A weak brother is the most dangerous thing’, he said, referring to how his cousins, uncles and brothers were all jealous of him. ‘I am a thorn in their eyes’, he continued ‘This is the have, have-not syndrome. So, I decided to work for them’.

Phool Singh explained that there is a vicious cycle of low-rank army employment in this region. While a person is serving in the army, his wife is at home raising the children and taking care of the farm. She is uneducated and often unable to guide her children. As a consequence, the children have low levels of education and are either employed into the army at a low rank or they go into agriculture. Phool Singh maintained that a state like Punjab is different in this regard: ‘People are industrious, practical, realistic…They have an instinct for survival in battle and outside. They are adventurous and can take risks. Each Subedar thinks about “how will my child become a doctor or an engineer”’. In comparison, Phool Singh contended that here people spend their time, effort and money on reciting oral kathas (recitations of the Devnarayan epic) over several days during which time there are great feasts and celebrations.

Phool Singh observed that before launching the andolan, Gujjar leaders had put their demand for ST status to the government, but their voices went unheard. Having spent so many years in the ‘cocooned life’ of the regiments, Phool Singh noted that he had not been acquainted with politics. He found that ‘we were deceived at every corner and we were frustrated. So I decided to launch an agitation’. He spoke about how the police shot and killed people during the second round of protests. Phool Singh did not say much more about the deaths, except that he intended the protests to be peaceful.

Phool Singh elaborated on the positive effects of what he called the andolan by talking about the formation of the new category of the ‘Special Backward Class (SBC)’ ⁶ and how the andolan resulted in an awakening among his people (in terms of education). I inquired why he decided to focus specifically on social change among Gujjars and why not for other backward groups in the villages. He smiled and replied, ‘The Gujjar Andolan was for love’.

My conversations with Phool Singh and Vijay Singh reveal the differences in friendship and love that can be conceived through Povinelli’s (2006) discussion of the discourses of the autological subject and the genealogical society. The autological subject refers to ‘discourses, practices, and fantasies about self-making, self-sovereignty, and the value of individual freedom associated with the Enlightenment project of contractual constitutional democracy and capitalism’ (ibid.: 4). The genealogical society reckons with discourses about ‘social constraints placed on the autological subject by various kinds of inheritances’ (ibid.). The friendship in the army described by Vijay Singh and Phool Singh revealed the self-making and self-sovereignty inherent in the cosmopolitanism that enables one to appreciate differences and learn from the other. While such discourses may appear to be autological, inheritances play a role, in terms of the regimental system (even in a mixed caste regiment) and the martial race theory, in the formation of friendship with fellow soldiers. The discourse of love for one’s caste, which Phool Singh said inspired the andolan, however, is much more inherited and therefore genealogical, evidenced particularly in how Vijay Singh said that such relationships are closely associated with blood and the spilling of blood. Blood and the spilling of blood can be traced to the martial race theory and the regimental system that are premised on the idea of the purity of blood and the lack of miscegenation of caste groups. ⁷

The inheritance of the racialised basis of caste love intersect with other associated inheritances of caste love. Ram Singh’s discussion earlier about Gujjars’ extravagant spending on feasts and mayra ceremonies as resembling the recklessness of the Bagaravat brothers who spent their wealth on debauchery echoes the imperfections of fellow Gujjars expressed by Vijay Singh and Phool Singh. While Gujjars may have expectations, jealousies, and lack of foresight and vision, and this points to the limits of friendship, nevertheless it allows for love. Despite these imperfections, or perhaps because of them, Gujjars are willing to sacrifice themselves. The sacrifice of the Bagaravat brothers is for the love of the sovereign Goddess, and the martyrdom of Gujjars in the andolan is for the love of one’s caste.

As discussed earlier, Gujjars identify themselves with the virta and martyrdom of the Bagaravat brothers. The sacrifice in the andolan is for the sovereign Goddess who is conflated with the love for one’s caste. Caste love is incarnated into the bodies of the dead Gujjars displayed for 17 days at the site of the andolan and the bodies of the living who witness and participate in the andolan by virtue of the fact that Gujjars believe that the same blood runs through the veins of all Gujjars. Hence the Gujjars in the andolan are not only enacting the scene of the killing of the Bagaravat brothers but they also incorporate aspects of the sovereign Goddess. We see, therefore, how incarnation is the ‘hinge joining elastic performances of sovereignty to the substance of politics’ (McAllister and Napolitano 2020: 6). And further in the bodies of the martyred and the living, we see, in Santner’s (2011) terms, ‘a bit of the flesh of the social bond itself, the stuff that the body of the sovereign was formerly charged with figuratively—and often theatrically—incorporating’ (ibid.: 58).

VII Conclusion

In recent years, scholars have been rethinking liberal conceptions of the public sphere to call for more ‘libidinal, corporeal, and poetic ties of kin and community’ (Chowdhury 2019: 29; Cody 2015) that animate protest. Building on the literature I have shown how conceptions of flesh and incarnation are central to the formations of popular sovereignty.

I examined the interactional histories, which led to the co-production of military and religious discourses and that animate the Gujjar men’s dialogical narratives of the army, epic, and andolan. These dialogical narratives are particularly evident in the ways in which Gujjars identify martyrdom in the army and andolan with the Bagaravat brothers’ sacrifice for the Goddess in the Devnarayan epic. Gujjars consider martyrdom in the epic, army, and andolan as a good death that leads to the regeneration of life. Such regeneration of life includes aspiration for upward mobility and social reform, as well as pahachaan that I translated as both caste identity and also a sense of well-being in the everyday.

The expressions of the exposure of the flesh produced at the site of the andolan where Gujjar men and women lay the bodies of the martyred Gujjar soldier cannot be characterised as bare life, or bios stripped from zoe, but rather the recuperation of the social. In particular, the recitations of the Devnarayan epic led to a recuperation of the social in the form of an auguring of well-being.

The laying out of bodies of the martyred Gujjars is also a recuperation of the social in the form of the production of caste. Gujjars in the andolan sacrifice themselves for caste love and the Bagaravat brothers in the epic sacrificed themselves for the Goddess. Gujjars’ identification with the Bagaravat brothers reveals how caste love is conflated with the Goddess. Caste love is incarnated into the bodies of both the martyred and the living participants in the andolan by virtue of the fact that Gujjars believe that the same blood runs through all members of the Gujjar caste. Hence the caste love and the sovereign Goddess is incarnated into the bodies of both the dead and living at the site of the andolan.

My Gujjar interlocutors described their fear and vulnerability of facing police firing during the Gujjar Andolan as opposed to when they served in the army and had the backing of the state. This vulnerability might serve as an expression of being reduced to bare life (Agamben 1998), but the rich narrative of the Devnarayan epic, and the ways it constitutes the everyday, folded into narratives of martyrdom in the andolan resulting in the recuperation of the social. The visceral and spectral dimensions of the flesh of the sovereign was disseminated to the protestors, exemplified by the incarnation of the sovereign Goddess into the bodies of the martyred and the living in the andolan. Here, the political was produced through these forms of incarnation and animated by the theos.