Social anthropologist and researcher at the CNRS, she has carried out research in Himachal Pradesh (North India). She has worked on linguistic procedures in dialogues which take place during possession rituals and on what gives effectiveness to this particular type of utterance. Other work has covered the development of divine iconography, local representations of the ritual efficacy, contemporary transformations of certain royal feasts and the persistence in contempoary state institutions of politico-ritual roles and practices associated in the past with royalty. Later work dealt with the persistence in today’s political institutions of politico-ritual roles and practices formerly associated with kingship.
She is currently working on two main projects. The first focuses on the impact of an organisation linked to Hindu nationalism which is implementing a programme for (re)writing history out of a large scale collection of local-level narratives. This research is part of a project by a larger team which she has been coordinating since 2002 on The Cultural Entrenchment of Hindutva. Local Mediations and Forms of Resistance. The second project is an anthropology of trial proceedings in Indian District Courts. She is especially working on criminal cases, studying how verbal interactions take place inside the courtroom and how these interactions are selected and linguistically transformed when put into written form in the official court recordings.
Abstract: This article analyses how the Hindutva ideological programme on history-writing is concretely implemented at grass-root levels by an rss-affiliated organisation. The organisationâs name is the Akhil Bharatiya Itihas Sankalan Yojna. The area of fieldwork moves from its rss headquarters to its Chandigarh branch and to its Kullu branch. The primary objective of the article is to shed light on the multiple forms of mediation of the organisation, which show how Hindutva influence in local society cannot be simply reduced to the direct effects of its militantsâ actions. It also examines how the Hindutva discourse on history infiltrates the local conception of regional culture,
merges with pre-existent conceptions and encounters specific forms of resistance. Finally, the article suggests the importance of understanding the Hindutva rereading of Indian history in the light of other post-colonial historiographies, engaged in a similar effort of placing the locality within a wider and prestigious framework.
Abstract: In spite of the success encountered by the state system of justice â a system that India inherited from British common law â the bulk of cases arriving at court sometimes simply corresponds to a choice which the parties make in the first instance, and which will eventually be abandoned in favour of other non official forms of compromise or adjustment. Even in criminal cases, where the state always acts as plaintiff, it often happens that the Prosecutor Witnesses, who initially testify against the accused when the case is registered by the police, ultimately deny or strongly tone down their accusations once questioned by the judge.
By referring to a specific case, the first aim is to analyse how the witnesses' change of attitude takes form inside the court, to what kind of interaction this corresponds during the trial and what kind of narrative it produces. This will allow me to spell out the roles that each one âthe judge, the prosecutor, the lawyers, the witnesses- plays during the trial, to follow their interactions, and to see how these interactions are transformed when they are recorded in written form, in what will become the official version of the trial.
