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Ungiven: Philanthropy as critique

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 March 2018

DWAIPAYAN BANERJEE  and
JACOB COPEMAN
DWAIPAYAN BANERJEE
Affiliation:
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA Email: dwai@mit.edu
JACOB COPEMAN
Affiliation:
University of Edinburgh, UK Email: jacob.copeman@ed.ac.uk
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Abstract

Drawing on field research principally from contexts of medical blood donation in North India, this article describes how gifts that are given often critique—by obviation—those that remain ungiven: the care not provided by the Indian state for Bhopal survivors, the family members unwilling to donate blood for their transfusion-requiring relative, and so on. In this way, giving can come to look like a form of criticism. The critiques that acts of giving stage are of absences and deficits: we present cases where large paper hearts donated by survivors of the 1984 Bhopal Gas Disaster to the prime minister of India signal his lack of one, where donated human blood critiques others' unwillingness to do so, where acts of blood donation critique and protest communal violence, and where similar acts of giving over simultaneously highlight a deficit in familial affects and an attempt to resuscitate damaged relational forms. We thus illustrate how critique can operate philanthropically by way of partonomic relations between the given and not-given.

Type
Research Article
Information
Modern Asian Studies , Volume 52 , Special Issue 1: Charity and Philanthropy in South Asia , January 2018 , pp. 325 - 350
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2018 

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Footnotes

*

Although we (Dwaipayan and Jacob) carried out our respective stretches of fieldwork in North India independently, in order to avoid unnecessary distraction, we do not differentiate between ourselves when presenting ethnography in this article. Jacob's main stretch of fieldwork on blood donation took place in Delhi and elsewhere in North India from 2003 to 2005, but has continued intermittently since that time. Dwai's fieldwork presented in this article was conducted in 2009, and continued discontinuously until 2011. We would like to thank Sandra Bärnreuther; Aya Ikegame; Arkotong Longkumer; Carlo Caduff; the Dartmouth College South Asia collective; audiences in Tokyo, Copenhagen, Durham, London, and Minneapolis; the special issue editors; and the MAS reviewers and editors for their very helpful comments on earlier versions of the article. All websites were last accessed in February 2017. The authors contributed equally to the article.

References

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37 Given that most paid donors were/are of low-caste status, the possibility that the ban on selling blood was informed by caste prejudice has been aired (see, for example, http://www.ambedkar.org/News/News071202.htm, [accessed 13 January 2018]—and see poem by Rao discussed below). However, it should also be noted that the move brought India's blood collection policy into line with international health protocols, which assert that safer blood results from non-remunerated donation.

38 We are again very grateful to one of the anonymous reviewers for whom this story of the politician's daughter whose weight becomes the measure of blood donation brings to mind the story of King Shibi, whose kingdom, and then his flesh, and then his entire body, become the counterweight to a bird who seeks his protection from a predator. Rather than our (the authors’) apparent acceptance of the doctor's description of this event as tamasha, might it not—in light of the story of King Shibi—also be read as yajna and, in particular, the kind of sacrifice that consecrates a king (or, in this case, a politician)? Though responding to this fascinating observation properly might demand another article, we offer several points: the politician in question is a local ‘strong man’ leader of a small Muslim party that is moulded in the image of the Shiv Sena. This does not in the least invalidate the points about King Shibi and the yajna-like nature of the spectacle (instances that are clearly from the Hindu canon). Indeed, we would agree that the template in which a politician is weighed—usually against cash but here against blood—does take its lead from the ritual consecration of the king and that, from the point of view of those political devotees who participated in the event, it probably did form such a consecration (see Copeman on the conjunction of the king, the politician, and blood donation. Copeman, J., ‘Blood will have blood’, Social Analysis, vol. 48, no. 3, 2004, pp. 126–48CrossRefGoogle Scholar). We think, however, that most members of the public would ally with the doctor's point of view of the event as a tamasha. The weighing of politicians against money, and more recently blood, is an established component of the political rally. At a ‘May Day Blood Donation Camp’ in Rajasthan, 104 Congress workers are reported to have donated blood equivalent to the body weight of Shri B. D. Kalla, president of the Rajasthan Pradesh Congress Committee (http://www.congressandesh.com/june-2005/june2005.pdf, [originally accessed February 2017, no longer available]). On the other hand, gurus and temple idols may also be weighed in this way. Gujarat blood donor recruiters related to us the practice of weighing idols of Krishna against donated blood. ‘A 6-foot Krishna might be 200 units,’ said one of them. Also in Gujarat, a blood-donation event called ‘Rakt Tula’ was staged in 2005 at the sixtieth birthday celebrations of the guru Swami Adhyatmananda. Finally, see Jonathan Parry on the mode of gift called tula-dan, which involves the weighing of the donor against the gift to be given. Parry, J., ‘On the moral perils of exchange’, in Money and the Morality of Exchange, Parry, J. and Bloch, M. (eds), Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1989, pp. 64–93CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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