Veena Das is Krieger-Eisenhower Professor of Anthropology at Johns Hopkins University.

“This book draws on years of meticulous research on everyday life in Delhi to open a new interpretation of slums with enormous political significance. Focusing on inordinate knowledge, Veena Das traces the violence forged in entanglements of punitive law, state torture, poverty, and vernacular critique. She makes us live the ground experience of biopolitics, massively escalated by contemporary state violations in India, and affectively endured by the poor in not always tragic ways. The thought in this book is deep, elegant, and urgent.”Ash Amin, University of Cambridge"an important read"Contributions to Indian Sociology

• AcknowledgementsChapter 1: IntroductionChapter 2: The Catastrophic Event: Enduring Inordinate KnowledgeChapter 3: The Dispersed Body of the Police and Fictions of the LawChapter 4: Detecting the Human: Under Which Skies Do We Theorize?Chapter 5: AfterwordNotesReferences

Veena Das is Krieger-Eisenhower Professor of Anthropology at Johns Hopkins University.

“This book draws on years of meticulous research on everyday life in Delhi to open a new interpretation of slums with enormous political significance. Focusing on inordinate knowledge, Veena Das traces the violence forged in entanglements of punitive law, state torture, poverty, and vernacular critique. She makes us live the ground experience of biopolitics, massively escalated by contemporary state violations in India, and affectively endured by the poor in not always tragic ways. The thought in this book is deep, elegant, and urgent.”Ash Amin, University of Cambridge"an important read"Contributions to Indian Sociology

• AcknowledgementsChapter 1: IntroductionChapter 2: The Catastrophic Event: Enduring Inordinate KnowledgeChapter 3: The Dispersed Body of the Police and Fictions of the LawChapter 4: Detecting the Human: Under Which Skies Do We Theorize?Chapter 5: AfterwordNotesReferences

Veena Das is Krieger-Eisenhower Professor of Anthropology at Johns Hopkins University.

“This book draws on years of meticulous research on everyday life in Delhi to open a new interpretation of slums with enormous political significance. Focusing on inordinate knowledge, Veena Das traces the violence forged in entanglements of punitive law, state torture, poverty, and vernacular critique. She makes us live the ground experience of biopolitics, massively escalated by contemporary state violations in India, and affectively endured by the poor in not always tragic ways. The thought in this book is deep, elegant, and urgent.”Ash Amin, University of Cambridge"an important read"Contributions to Indian Sociology

• AcknowledgementsChapter 1: IntroductionChapter 2: The Catastrophic Event: Enduring Inordinate KnowledgeChapter 3: The Dispersed Body of the Police and Fictions of the LawChapter 4: Detecting the Human: Under Which Skies Do We Theorize?Chapter 5: AfterwordNotesReferences