Dikshit Sarma Bhagabati (2023)

My research focuses on how the marginalised express their own sovereign enunciations of human rights law that militate against the dominant tenets of the state, international organisations, aid workers, and lawyers. Instead of always teaching the marginalised how to participate better in civil society, perhaps those legally trained should also learn from them sometimes. To this end, my anthropological method seeks to displace law from its sanctuary in courtrooms and authoritative institutions to the humdrum of everydayness. I conceive of my fieldwork with the Brokpa people in the high Himalayas of India as a way of doing (postcolonial, jurisprudential, literary, ethnographic, and auto-ethnographic) critical theory. The point is to situate a liminality where our critiques of human rights law and its renewed contemporary importance can mutually converse rather than diminish each other. In a sense, my research also engages with the broader political and ethical significance of universalities in today’s world—if at all they are possible, and if so, in what relation to localised or vernacular idioms of seemingly universal categories. My thesis engages with these themes by developing a theory of recognition suited to imperfect democracies and stratified civil societies. 

Publications

2023.  “How to Be Indigenous in India”. Law and Critique: doi.org/10.1007/s10978-023-09343-8.

2021.  “Crafting Criminality: Into a Magical Dystopia with Delinquent Objects.” Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies 21, no. 1 : 115-126.

2021.  “Baptising Pandita Ramabai: Faith and Religiosity in the Nineteenth-Century Social Reform Movements of Colonial India.” Indian Economic and Social History Review 58, no. 3: 393-424.

2021.  “Exorcisms: Xenophobia, Citizenship, and the Spectre of Assamese Nationalism.” Jindal Global Law Review 12, no. 1 : 171-203.

2021.  “Dancing by the Juniper: Notes from the Performative Field of the Brokpa’s Cultural Enactment.” Asian Journal of Social Science 49, no. 2 : 109-119.

2021.  “Barefoot with a ‘Band of Criminals’: Law and the Social Life of Objects in a Street Magician’s Bag.” Alternative Law Journal 46, no. 1: 75-81.

2020.  “Editorial.” Jindal Law and Humanities Review 1, no. 1: ii-ix.

2020.  “What’s in a Name? Locating the Constitution as a Signifier.” Journal of Indian Law and Society 11, no. 2: 43-59.

2020.  “Reclaiming Personhood: Subjecthood and Property Relations in Hindu Succession Laws.” NUALS Law Journal 14, no. 1: 1-15.

2018.  “Not a Land of Street Magicians: A Study on Intergenerational Mobility Among the Maseit Street Magicians of Kathputli Colony, Delhi.” SubVersions 6, no. 1 : 1-24.

2019.  “Obscene or Artistic? The Poetics and Politics of the Obscenity Law in India.” Indian Law Review 3, no. 2: 33-60.

2018.  “Onstage and Offstage - Dance of the Brokpa.” Economic and Political Weekly 53, no. 31: 109.