Anthropologist Veena Das here revisits two critical events in Indian history: the Partition riots of 1947, and the violence against Sikhs following the 1984 assassination of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi. Though Das has grappled with complex (and sometimes tortured) analyses of these same events in previous works, Life and Words represents an important departure from her more narrowly ethnographic essays. She readjusts her focus toward a theoretical/philosophical interrogation of the “ordinary” in an effort to complicate existing temporal and epistemological assumptions that have characterized studies of violence in India. The book is a two-part study: It first examines the way in which extraordinary violence (in this case that of Partition) gets “folded” into the everyday lives of those who have survived catastrophe. Second, she turns to how the violence of everyday life provides the necessary conditions for “eventful” eruptions of collective violence (in this case that against Sikhs in 1984). In blurring the boundaries between the ordinary and the eventful, Das is able to gain significant insights into the interface between the individual and the collective, the local and the supralocal, and the historical and the anthropological.

In the book's first part Das characterizes the “communal” riots of Partition as the “founding violence” of the nascent Indian Republic. Central to this foundation was a concern for the repatriation of “abducted women” from both sides of the communal divide. She argues that this concern was a masculine one, and was, in fact, predicated on a conflation of the originary social contract with a “sexual contract” that subordinated female subjects of the new republic to patriarchal rule. Women's bodies, in this sense, became the “map” of independent India, a map, also then, of the violence that gave birth to the nation. Yet, because of its magnitude, the violence that was charted on the bodies of women could not and cannot be effectively narrated. Instead, it must be apprehended in its continuing trajectory of everyday survival and accommodation. The anthropologist's task, therefore, is not simply to collect or recount stories of Partition, but to track the ways in which the “poisonous knowledge” of Partition violence has insinuated itself into the daily lives of survivors. In this context Das examines ways in which particular women have “reinhabited” everyday life after having survived extraordinary violence, detailing the social negotiations, internalized grief, and (almost) incidental gestures of loss that color their descent back into the ordinary.

Following Walter Benjamin's well-known dialectic, Das argues that if Partition represents the “founding violence” of the Indian State, events such as the anti-Sikh violence of 1984 can be understood as the “maintaining violence” of the state. However, the state here is not conceived as a transcendent entity, able to impose its will from above; rather, the real “magic” of the state, according to Das, lies in its illegibility. As such, the signature of the state is never fixed, but instead can be reproduced, forged, or foisted according to context and contingency. It is with this understanding in mind that Das investigates anti-Sikh violence in 1984 in a specific locality of Delhi (Sultanpuri), and convincingly demonstrates how violence, rumor, and impunity circulate according to local logics that emerge from the existing social configuration. Thus, the everyday exigencies of class, caste, and political rivalry provide the key to understanding the specificity of collective violence. Das' insistence on the contingencies of local specificity makes Life and Words essential reading for students and scholars of collective violence. She reminds us that the devil of “world-annihilating violence” really is in the details, and, correspondingly, that understanding the social strategies employed by survivors must also be a matter of particular and painstaking analysis, rather than an ascent into meta-theory, which would, again, only deprive survivors of their individual subject-hood.