Megha Sharma Sehdev

This dissertation is an ethnography of women’s engagement with a cluster of laws surrounding domestic violence in New Delhi, India. The majority of women’s domestic violence complaints do not result in outcomes such as protection orders, compensation awards, or criminal charges. Instead, cases are perpetually deferred, in-process, and marked by interim orders. I argue that the overwhelming dilation of legal cases suggests we hold in abeyance the notion of legal promise, and frame domestic violence law not as a technology for decision-making, but as coterminous with its “other,” or everyday life. Rather than posit delay as an inert time of waiting, this dissertation traces the law through its material nodes around which relations are continually organized.

Each chapter situates the law as a field where it bleeds into forms considered not proper to it – beginning with the bureaucracy of filemaking, followed by court counseling, and moving to relations of suspicion in a locality, and a divorce obtained by mysterious means. By following legal artifacts such as networks, files, voice, image, and gesture across space, scales and temporalities, I track the discontinuous process by which law travels through rivaling jurisdictions –a rivalry structured by feminist reform, the Indian state’s commitment to preserving the family, and legal contradictions growing from historical contests over intimacy, right and custom.

The dissertation makes two main arguments: first, the law does not orient itself to outcome but furnishes an unsteady material milieu in which women attempt to secure a footing. Secondly, the law is not a bounded domain of rule and procedure; rather, its practices are vulnerable to, and constituted by, the durations and intensities of the everyday.

The ethnographic fieldwork in this dissertation consisted of observations in the lower (criminal and civil) courts of Delhi, in counseling and mediation offices attached to the courts, and in paralegal and non-governmental organizations. It also consisted of extended case studies that followed particular women and their families as their legal matters developed over a number of years.

Supervisor: Veena Das
Readers: Deborah Poole, Naveeda Khan, Jennifer Culbert, Katherine Lemons, Juan Obarrio, Graham Mooney,

The notion of generations runs through feminist theory, rendering it singular and disciplining its proper subjects-but might there be modes of generational thought that explode the bounds of linearity and propriety, offering ways to think of kinship and generativity amid and despite conditions of violence? Drawing on ethnography situated in South Asia, and the gendered insights that emerge from it, we reflect on feminist knowledge as a site of kinship that complicates any simple picture of inheritance and lineage. Affiliations of thought, practice, and relating might be characterized instead by a range of gendered practices which are constituted by, and draw attention to, modes and processes such as gathering and dispersal; impasse and reconnection; and recognition and uncertainty.

Recent feminist writings have likened crochet to coral reefs and other ecological forms that privilege a hyperbolic and expansive creativity. Looping text with a series of photographs taken by the author between 2013 and 2016, this essay describes women's crochet in Delhi, India as a form that intensively manipulates surfaces rather than expanding along them. The proximate action of crochet – structured and expressive, domestic and otherworldly – imparts a disruptive plasticity to surroundings. Women's domestic lives are sites of sensory and temporal attunement, a wakefulness to the self, mediated by this plasticity of crochet in both practice and form.

This essay considers the public sphere debate as a particular ghost which animates politics in India today. A key motif of the modern social contract is the image that progress and growth in the nation-state occur when civilized men come into measured rhythms of discussion and debate. While activist intellectuals have tirelessly drawn our attention to fascist ideologies and counter-ideologies, this essay considers what might happen if we approach violence instead through the ordinary, the tactile, and the intimate. This is not to be understood as enablement or approval of violence but rather as a way to bring violence home  – or how to touch, grasp, and shift its face with the help of small hands.

To cite:
Sehdev, Megha Sharma (2022). Rhythm and the Small Hands of Violence. In “Ghosts,” Stimulus Respond, July: pg.94-97.

Historically, pandemics are known to expand and extend the authoritarian powers of state. In India too, the central government has mobilised the colonial-era Epidemic Diseases Act, and the National Disaster Management Act (2005) — to authorise search and quarantine measures, as well as censor and criminalize dissenting voices. In what follows, we explore the state’s broadened powers of surveillance and policing in two frontier zones of South Asia: Kashmir and Punjab. Both regions are marked by long histories of resistance, and brutal state suppression including torture, violence and extrajudicial killings. In the Kashmir Valley, a movement for liberation from Indian rule has been ongoing since 1989. In Punjab, a militant separatist movement raged between the 1970s and 1990s before losing popular support, though many accounts suggest the movement perseveres, especially in the diaspora. The recent arrival of COVID-19 has served to augment and distort surveillance in these regions, folding them further into the ambit of state control.

In this seminar, we explore children and youth as figures who can guide us into elusive dimensions of experience and knowledge. Moving beyond liberal preconceptions of childhood, we will consider children/youth as beings with access to experiential realms that adults may not be able to readily see or predict. We will explore how children and youth access invisible worlds, within a range of situations and settings including social realities of violence and suffering, across institutions, politics, and the state, and amid contemporary crises. Aside from visiting ethnographies that focus on the experiences of children and youth, the course assumes that the “child voice” is a region of voice in all of us.

The seminar will begin by exploring how children orient themselves to the human and nonhuman. How do children guide us into new worlds and into an unexpected sense of the living and animate? The second part of the seminar considers how youth are recruited into projects of war, violence, and labour. What does the plasticity of childhood or youthfulness offer to militias, insurgencies, and to state projects of violence? How do young people act through relations in which care is enmeshed with violence? In the third quarter, the seminar considers the forms of knowledge that children/youth offer to institutions such as law and medicine. Instead of replicating liberal divides between children, sexuality, and violence, this module asks how children’s intimate experiences of events are taken up or re-worked by institutional knowledge practices. Final sessions will cover questions of childhood and futurity especially in the age of global crisis.

This course is designed for students conducting a semester-long internship with a social justice organization in Baltimore. The internship will be arranged through the Center of Social Concern at JHU in consultation with the course instructor. The goals of the course are to help students understand the institutional dynamics of social justice work, to identify its challenges (ethical, political, etc.); and to produce a personal research archive for critical analysis. In class meetings students will learn techniques of ethnographic research guided by feminist methodologies, in order to make sense of our internship experiences.

The course engages a number of methodological questions that reveal the complexity of feminist thinking itself. We begin by exploring a fundamental aspect of feminist ethics, which is to attune ourselves to the voices of others. How can we attend to goals, aspirations, and desires that may seem radical, that is not "of our worlds " ? The second module turns to technologies of recordkeeping in institutional bureaucracies. Instead of assuming an omniscient perspective on the organization, we approach institutional records as a type of " partial perspective " that reveals as much as it conceals. Bureaucratic artifacts such as files, maps, and surveys can be significantly reworked  through a feminist ethnographic gaze, as we will explore. The fourth module moves beyond the organizational proper to explore social justice issues as they appear across unexpected sites, such as domestic spaces, everyday life, and religious practices, as well as in digital worlds. Finally, the last module interrogates ethnography from the perspective of activism, and vice-versa.

This course explores how photographs can be used as a tool in the writing process. Many well-known writers such as Sigmund Freud kept photographs to help develop theoretical ideas; many more-including Arthur Conan Doyle, Victor Hugo, Emile Zola, and Lewis Carroll – were amateur photographers and used photos to render descriptions of places. Anthropologists, no less, have used photography from the colonial period to the present in order to capture, remember, and analyze aspects of human culture in their fieldsites. In this course we will: 1) acquire basic composition skills in photography; 2) explore how photographs can assist us in developing an anthropological writing practice; 3) examine how photographs interact with writing. A text may strive to "replicate" a photograph, but we will also explore other dynamics between these mediums. When does the analogy between photo and text collapse? What can one medium accomplish that the other cannot? Other themes to be covered will include: rendering a description versus forming an interpretation; the place of sensations and interiority in the creative process, and the role of time and reflection in drafting a photo-text. We will also discuss issues of care and ethics in photographing and describing people, places, and objects.

Course Structure: The course will be project-based. You will be introduced to basic photographic composition skills using principles of geometry, framing, and emphasis, and you will use the principles to take photographs of your chosen fieldsite. We will then practice writing descriptions drawing from our fieldnotes. The class will examine particular texts in which visual imagery has been coupled with certain forms of writing; based on these readings, we will experiment with writing techniques. As time goes on, the earlier data and write-ups will be re-visited to see what aspects may have initially escaped our awareness. Thus we will learn to " re-visualize " image and text in an ongoing analytic process. Toward the end, we will work on producing a vision of our individual writing that carries a degree of consistency and a narrative arc.

Class website: http://craftinganthropologicaltext.tumblr.com

The imagination of waiting under law tends to privilege secular temporalities of progress, assuming that people wait for the state to execute its logics. In this paper, I draw on a case study of a woman named Anita to show how adversarial relations under law are subject to other temporalities of suspicion. Anita often plunged into sidelong plots that distracted from her domestic violence case. These plots intersected with legal procedure as much as they threatened to swallow it. I use the metaphor of the stutter (and an associated family of concepts in Hindi: jhijhak/hitch, chhatpatahat/restlessness, jhatak/jerk) to show how Anita's case was perpetually wrenched open as it snarled on mysterious events outside the courtroom (kissi cheez pe adnaa). I suggest that women do not suppress the problem of violence, but instead encounter it through other networks of causality. The figure of the stutter shows how legal forms such as documents "catch" in the everyday. As Indian law perpetually "gives time" for women to explore family reconciliation, its irregular rhythms reveal it as fundamentally marked by an alterior temporality.

This presentation focuses on the jurisdiction of law as constituted by gestures, sounds, and speech – or the way everyday people interact with law. Instead of thinking of law as territorial sovereignty, it pays attention to the materiality and physiognomy of legal jurisdiction. By analyzing scenes from counselling sessions, I show how bodily comportment, especially women’s gestures and voices, are framed by counselling procedure, as well as by the “forensic architecture” of administrative buildings (Weizman 2017). Bodily gesture, I argue, is a site of intimate exchange between counsellors, litigating women, and extended families. At the same time, counsellors’ evaluation of gesture comes to shape cases in unexpected ways. The paper explores the fragile links between shadowy jurisdictions under family law, and legal sovereignty.

This presentation approaches the Indian Family Court hearing ethnographically to reveal how judges, lawyers and litigants make decisions, arguments, and claims within a court distracted by the material-bureaucratic effects of filemaking. Rather than Family Court as an ideal “public sphere” or conversely as a dehumanising bureaucratic regime, I argue that legal proceedings must be seen as a courtroom ecology—even “media ecology”—involving interaction between registers of talk and deliberation and machinic, non-human action such as typing and dictation. An ecological view of the courtroom reveals a varied, interruptive terrain where legal talk and family spectacle take shape within the interstices—such as the pauses and demands—of filemaking. While women’s claims are susceptible to being drowned out, I show how gendered expressions take shape through multiple media—becoming misrecognised, taken-up, or amplified through the gestures of bureaucracy.  The paper suggests novel, multi-ontological directions for court ethnography where procedure is shown to be linked with the material and social life present in the court.  It also suggests that gendered, intimate claims cannot be seen as a priori to the courtroom environment.

Once proudly traded and displayed, crochet work made by Indian women is increasingly found buried in almeerahs and chests, and left behind in villages. "Hidden Museums of Crochet" is a series of artefacts, archaeologically unearthed and newly commissioned, which reveals the growing pastness of this universal, yet profoundly South Asian, craft.

Introductory text:

Crochet pieces have historically been used to cover domestic objects. In India, the act of covering spans the functional (to prevent dust collecting on appliances), the ritual (protecting sacrificial foods as they are ferried to temples), and the supernatural (covering mirrors to avoid the uncanny sight of one’s own image and what it may channel). Crochet pieces, in this way, have been situated between the everyday world of dust and the mysterious worlds of machines and sacrality. The outer world that crochet maps is as important to its objecthood as the interior worlds that it safeguards, suggesting a mutual porosity encompassed by particular designs and textures.

Even as levels of dust appear to be increasing in Indian cities, something of the mediating effect of crochet has been lost. Its production is in steep decline; it is a fading art. Mass-manufactured goods have largely replaced the function of crochet in domestic spaces. The tendency of cotton stitches to unravel and degrade make their synthetic counterparts – acrylic trims, or plastic covers – more durable alternatives. Prepared by women sometimes decades ago for life events such as marriage, the handmate, ornate objects are seldom discarded, but hardly seen. Increasingly hidden in chests, or cupboards, and left behind in villages, crochet pieces accrue dust, damage and stains in a different sense than in their erstwhile use.

“Hidden Museums of Crochet” is an ongoing ethnographic and photographic project based in New Delhi. Its aims are to exhume, and make visible, hidden crochet artifacts. Where women can no longer access old piece,  they are commissioned to produce new ones. In the photographic series a number of crochet works have been isolated as museological objects and,  in some cases, “re-staged” as domestic coverings. Crochet in the photographs is shown as robust, a relatively accessible craft. The photos also, however, reveal crochet as vulnerable to the market, to the elements, and to dust and memory.

Transnational trends in documentary photography have recently taken a " domestic turn," focusing on everyday scenes and objects in home spaces. This newfound attention to domestic objects on the one hand continues an aesthetic preoccupation from the 1990s with commodity culture, shifting critiques of the commodity fetish to an appreciation of the ontological status of everyday objects. Yet, new works also signal that home spaces are no longer hidden from the gaze of surveillance – especially from documentary technologies that reveal our most intimate lives to human voyeurism and digital algorithms. In this photo project, entitled 'ghar aur kaagaz' – Hindi for 'Home and Document' (or more literally, 'Home and Paper'), we mimic documentary photography's use of mundane and everyday " object tableaus ". As in the work of Indian documentary photographers Gauri Gill, and Tejal Shah, daily objects come to life as they stand for themselves, affectively charged. However, our images tend to short-circuit this material coherence. Superimposed over the photos is an overpowering discursive form – text from legal domestic violence cases. The project is a deliberate attempt to combine visualizations of domestic space with meta-level descriptions of domestic space offered by legal writing. It therefore performs the critique of surveillance presumably within current documentary photography – that intimate spaces are open-ended – open to voyeuristic eyes, affects, and sometimes to dangerous interpretations. However, rather than stopping at the " openness " of the image, we show how absurd and melodramatic legal text, in performing a discursive reading – enters back into the frame, creating a moment in which genres, spaces, and objects – become unintelligible and momentarily collapse. The photos are a series of pictures taken by the artists of domestic spaces in New Delhi. The textual matter has been culled from legal documentation from the anthropologist's (Megha Sehdev's) case studies of domestic violence litigation in the Delhi district courts.

The Delhi family court dissolves dozens of marriages everyday. Parties must submit bank statements, salary slips, and affidavits to the judge that attest to their incomes and assets. Judges, in turn, use numerical figures from the documents in a rough equation to determine alimony and settlement. Some parties, however, opt to settle the dispute in a paralegal process called “counselling,” attached to the formal court.  In the counselling cell attention to documentary proofs and referential formulas completely disappears. Instead, a female counsellor coordinates negotiations between female petitioners and male respondents, and sometimes their extended families and lawyers. In the place of documentary evidence there is an elaborate interaction involving lengthy discussion, displays of emotion, and bodily gestures – culminating, at times, in a settlement figure that is signed and delivered to the judge. In this presentation, I argue that women-led counselling sessions involve a process of arriving at numbers that can be described as neither strategy nor calculation. Instead, following Maurer (2010), I pay attention to the gendered “phenomenology of numbers,” arguing that numerical figures carry semiotic weight that strays away from arithmetic calculation. Numbers, rather, emerge from the ground of the unfolding dispute. In this way, numbers become gendered: they are intimately tied to bodies, accusations of cruelty in marriage, and the tempo of counselling procedure.

Battered Woman Syndrome has figured in Euro-American litigation since the 1990s, where its valence as “syndrome” and as scientific category has been debated, but where the category is nevertheless used to support women’s claims. In contrast, Battered Woman Syndrome has rarely been cited in Indian domestic violence cases. This is despite a robust framework of domestic violence-related laws in India and the close relationship of these laws with expert knowledge such as social work. This paper speculates on the curious appearance of Battered Woman Syndrome in a recent Indian High Court judgment entitled Manju Lakra vs State of Assam, 2013. In 2007, Manju Lakra was convicted to life in prison for the murder of her husband. In 2013, The High Court overturned the lower court’s decision and held Lakra guilty of the lesser charge of culpable homicide (not amounting to murder), thus reducing her sentence considerably. The two-justice bench considered the mitigating factor that Lakra was “provoked” by her husband, who had been physically abusive throughout the course of their marriage. The judgment argues, specifically, that Lakra suffered chronic abuse in her marriage resulting in uncontrollable aggression on the night of the incident. Rather than referring to expert evidence, the judgment mobilizes a number of precedents where the trope of “provocation” figures in regionally specific registers, ranging from extra-marital affairs, to honour killings, to women’s suicides in relation to demands for dowry. The paper draws on this set of precedents, as well as a handful of subsequent cases, to argue that Battered Woman Syndrome in India is emerging as a regionally-specific forensic category.

This paper discusses the manifestation of stress, disillusionment, and other symptoms of economic hardship in an urbanizing settlement in Uttarakhand, India. Most men and women who leave villages in search of urban mobility find themselves in difficult situations of poverty and debt. Migrants sometimes use medicalizing language such as “tension” to express change. Yet they desist from describing anxiety as a quintessential experience. For women, especially, anxiety is frequently accompanied by ideas and imperatives of modesty. Depending on context, women describe the combination of anxiety-modesty as troubling, benign, and/or satisfying. The goal of this paper is to describe varying, heightened forms of anxiety-modesty that emerge upon migration to the semi-urban. The purpose is to shun old dichotomies, for example, pro-capitalist sensibility versus traditionalist reaction. In so doing, the paper furthers a theoretical suspicion of emotion, which relies too heavily on culture and offers little to discuss rapid changes in women’s worlds. Instead, theories of affect are presented for the way they carry experiential combinations (of feeling X, feeling Y, Z etc.) in contexts of economic and social uncertainty. The paper concludes by situating emotion, affect, and mood on a theoretical spectrum and describing related challenges of methodology and observation.

This paper draws on empirical findings from interview studies in the USA and Canada to interrogate the idea that expanding practices of genetic testing are likely to transform kin and family relations in fundamental ways. We argue that in connection with common adult onset disorders in which susceptibility genes with low predictive power are implicated it is unlikely that family relationships will be radically altered as a result of learning about either individual or family genotypes. Rather, pre-existing family dynamics and ideas about family susceptibilities for disease may be reinforced. The case of the ApoE gene and its relationship to Alzheimer’s disease is used as an illustrative example. We found that “postgenomic” thinking, in which complexity of disease causation is emphasized, is readily apparent in informant narratives.

Recent work in anthropology has translated systemic disjuncture to individual subjectivity, under the premise that disordered political economies cause disordered identities.  However this work underplays the role of affect in gathering subjectivity amidst external transformation. The following thesis proposes a concept of mood as a set of conjoined, low-level affects that provides continuity in contexts of neoliberalism and change. It investigates women's moods in an urbanizing region of Uttarakhand, India. Drawing from ethnographic interviews in a village, and a migrant community, mood is shown to involve components of economic anxiety that articulate with attitudes of docility and duty.  Experiences typically described as postmodern including incompleteness, estrangement and alienation, are common to, and produce classical gendered affects in both rural and urban settings. Although anxiety can be destabilizing, it joins paradoxically with these affects to lubricate women's sense of belonging in a place.

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Des travaux récents en anthropologie décrivent la façon dont des disjonctions systémiques se traduisent au niveau de la subjectivité individuelle. La prémisse sur laquelle ils reposent est qu’une économie politique désordonnée produit une identité  désordonnée. Cependant, ces travaux sous-estiment la manière dont l’affect rassemble  la subjectivité à travers les transformations qui opèrent à l’extérieur. Cette recherche propose l’idée que l’humeur , en tant qu’elle constitue un ensemble d’affects reliés, opérant à bas bruit, procure un sentiment de continuité dans le contexte du changement néo-libéral. L’auteur examine plus spécifiquement les humeurs de femmes vivant dans une région en voie d’urbanisation de l’Uttarakhand, en Inde. En se basant sur des entrevues ethnographiques réalisées dans un village et dans une communauté migrante, elle montre la façon dont l’humeur intègre les composantes de l’anxiété associée au capitalisme et qui s’articulent par ailleurs avec les attitudes sexuées de docilité et de devoir. L’argument est que des expériences qui sont typiquement postmodernes, incluant un sentiment d’ incomplétude, d’étrangeté et d’aliénation, sont à la fois commune à, et produisent, des affects liés au sexe dans un contexte de perturbations sociales et économiques. Même si l’anxiété peut être déstabilisante, elle rejoint paradoxalement ces affects qui lubrifient le sentiment des femmes d’appartenir à un lieu.