Social Science Research Council

"Affect and Temporality in Human Rights: Death by Starvation in Rajasthan, India"

In this project I am trying to investigate the 'temporality' and 'affect' of human rights in the context of acute poverty in India, a 'newly globalizing' economy. In the last decade or so, human rights has become the central framework within which institutions of civil society worldwide understand and act upon very diverse situations of suffering and marginalization. This framework seems most compelling when faced with immediate, morally abhorrent acts of violence. That is to say, temporally it needs an immediate crisis and affectively it needs a moral dramaturgy. Is it as viable when confronted by pervasive, longer-term problems of structural inequality? I will investigate this problem by following the afterlife of a recent controversy over state responsibility, following a spate of starvation deaths among the Sahariya tribes in the Baran district of Rajasthan, India. The controversy began with a petition filed by the 'Right to Food' Campaign and the Human Rights Law Network in the Indian Supreme Court, in April 2001, charging the government with culpability for the 'unnatural deaths', since public food stocks stood at an unprecedented high. Various juridical-political responses followed, and the controversy is now supposed to have 'ended', although sporadic media reports continued to report similar deaths among the Sahariyas in subsequent months. The question which interests me is: What qualifies as a 'crisis' in contemporary democracies? Is it possible to sustain the affective intensity required for the invocation of 'human rights' in the face of endemic scarcity? What level of suffering is required for such intensity, or responsiveness to be generated (and if it necessarily involves death, then what place does 'life' have within such a framework)? Jean Dreze and Amartya Sen's influential work on 'hunger and public action', which provides the intellectual basis for the 'Right to Food' campaign, points to a somewhat similar difficulty in analyzing or generating public sentiment around endemic scarcity as distinct from large-scale, newsworthy events like famines. In this project I will try to address this lacunae anthropologically, combining ethnography with archival work in order to trace: a) the long history of governmental 'improvement schemes' for the Sahariyas and interventions in the region of Baran; b) the subjective and collective modalities of experiencing crisis or loss immanent to a regularized ecology of scarcity among people living in the area; c) the ways in which the starvation deaths get discursively re-configured through local, national and international networks; and d) the forms in which these discursive movements are drawn back into the weave of everyday life in Baran.