Violent Modernities

Book excerpt: It is believed that law and violence generally share an antithetical relationship in liberal democracies. Lawlessness is understood to produce violence, and law is invoked and deployed as a means to resist and undo that. Violent Modernities attempts to establish that this relationship is not one of animosity, but of a deep, counterintuitive intimacy and is at the base of what makes India a modern nation-state. Delving into the patterns of law and violence through the cultural imaginaries of justice, marked by the combined rise of neoliberalism and Hindutva—the book argues that legal imagination in India does not only emanate from courtrooms, legislations and judgments, but is also lived in the practices of ordinary disobediences and everyday failures. The author suggests that it is only when law can be re-imagined as such, that the violence at the foundations of state law can be unsettled.