Magic Tricks The Politics of Memory, State, and Tribe in Lahaul, India

• Published in: Meridians (Middletown, Conn.) Vol. 13; no. 1; pp. 157 - 185
• Main Author: Bhattacharya, Himika
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Durham Duke University Press 01.01.2015; Indiana University Press
• Subjects: African American Studies and Black Diaspora; Chicanx and Latinx Studies; Communities; Death & dying; Demographic aspects; Domestic violence; Females; Feminism; Feminism and Women's Studies; Gender and Sexuality; In the Trenches; Local politics; Magic tricks; Memory; Narratives; Patriarchies; Patriarchy; Police; Political aspects; Politics; Postcolonialism; Sentence structure; Sexual violence; Social aspects; Violence; Violence against women; Women; India
• ISSN: 1536-6936; 1547-8424
• DOI: 10.2979/meridians.13.1.157

This article traces the memories surrounding the death of an adivasi woman, Shalini, from the northwestern Himalayan (adivasi/tribal) region of Lahaul, India. By focusing on how the memories of her death evolve in both official and community discourses, this article sheds light on some key issues within the complex web of tribe and state politics in India. These two discourses co-constitute each other and transform Shalini's death from pertaining to (gendered) violence to eventually being dismissed as an accident. Thus, violence (against adivasi women) becomes the register on which the otherwise oppositional patriarchies of state and tribe collude and produce the woman as both an unreliable subject and a target of violence. Finally, the article explores counter-memory as a means to rearticulate and reframe the memory of Shalini's death where her subject position is that of a believable agent, one who is not (pre)determined (as unreliable) by state and tribal patriarchies.