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opportunities for torture, intimidation, harassment of the accused and their respective kin and friends, while also blurring the distinction between a suspect and a witness.

      Chapter 4, “Detecting the Human: Under Which Skies Do We Theorize?,” asks how do we think of the limits of the human not as a metaphysical issue, but one as it arises within a weave of life? The inhuman as a limit of the human, I argue, lies not in monstrosities produced by nature or in evil inherent in men and women, but in the machines that provide the affordances for the inhuman to become one eventuality of the human.

      How, then, are we to think of the imperatives to give expression to this experience of inhumanity I found in the slums? The question, as Cavell (1979) has phrased it, is not how society provides correction to its soul as a picture of one’s being within a form of life, of the knitting of the interior and the exterior; it is, rather, how does the soul find ways of correcting its society? It is in response to this question that I look at ethnographic moments, the story written by a child, a mother’s primitive cry as expressing how she experienced her son’s torture, four friends watering the fragile plant of friendship across the Hindu-Muslim divide in a politically fraught environment, as examples of the ways of a soul finding its society. These are also moments that are woven into the becoming of an anthropologist, or into the kind of anthropologist I have become.

      The Conclusion should help the voices that have emerged in this text through the intimacy between this writer and the lives and texts she has lived with, to circle back to this very moment in the Introduction as one must return repeatedly to the experience of being in the middle of things, and being within a circle of figures of thought.

      1 1. According to the 2021 Master Plan of Delhi, the unplanned settlements in Delhi can be divided into the following types: resettlement sites, designated slums, urban villages, regularized unauthorized settlements, unauthorized settlements and squatter settlements, also known as JJ (jhuggi jhopdi) colonies. Different kinds of settlements enjoy different degrees of security of tenure – so, for instance, designated slums have rights against eviction under the Delhi Slum Act of 1956; resettlement sites that originated under the government’s own initiative, most notoriously during the beautification-cum-sterilization drive under the National Emergency in 1976 (Tarlo 2003) gave permanent lease to holders over the land allotted to them. Some squatter settlements might have obtained stay orders against eviction from courts but the possibility of their shanties being demolished always looms over their lives. According to different estimates, about 50–70% of the population of Delhi lives in these “unplanned settlements” – thus these populations are not marginal to the life of the city but constitute its very fabric.

      2 2. Norbert Elias, the scholar whose work on the civilizing process was extremely influential, had to confront the question of Nazi camps at the heart of European civilization and, hence, what was “civilized barbarism.” See Elias (1996).

      3 3. For an incisive critique of how the radicalization discourse has been used in the PREVENT strategy in the UK and has achieved discursive popularity though there is little empirical data to support the thesis,

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