Veena Das

What does it mean to witness violence-not just as a historical event, but as something that seeps into everyday life? Veena Das, one of the most influential anthropologists of our time, has spent a lifetime grappling with this question. From the aftermath of India’s Partition to the silent grief embedded in urban poverty, Das has illuminated the subtle ways in which suffering and the social intertwine.

Born in postcolonial India and trained under M. N. Srinivas, Das’s early academic foundation was rooted in structuralism and ritual. But it was the eruption of mass violence-especially the 1984 anti-Sikh riots-that transformed her trajectory. Her work since then has fundamentally reoriented how anthropologists think about trauma, the state, and the ordinary. Rather than treating violence as a rupture, Das shows how it becomes part of everyday life, shaping how people speak, relate, and endure.

Through groundbreaking books like Life and Words, Affliction, and Slum Acts, Das has forged a unique path that brings anthropology into conversation with philosophy, psychiatry, and public health. Her ethnographies do not merely describe-they challenge us to listen to the silences in what people say, to the textures of the ordinary in extraordinary conditions.

Early Life & Education

Veena Das was born in 1945 in Delhi, India, amid the tumultuous backdrop of the final years of British colonialism. The experience of living through Partition and its aftermath-marked by widespread communal violence and displacement-deeply influenced her later scholarly focus on social suffering and ordinary life.

She pursued her undergraduate degree at Indraprastha College for Women, Delhi University, where she developed a keen interest in sociology and social anthropology. This intellectual curiosity led her to the Delhi School of Economics (DSE), where she completed both her MA and PhD under the mentorship of renowned sociologist M. N. Srinivas. Her doctoral research-completed around 1970-focused on ritual and caste dynamics in northern Indian villages, framing her early work in the structuralist tradition.

Academic Career & Positions

• Delhi School of Economics (1967–2000): Das joined DSE as a lecturer in 1967 and rose through the ranks to become a full professor. During these decades, she built a reputation as a formidable teacher and mentor, shaping generations of anthropologists, especially in South Asia.
• New School for Social Research (1997–2000): She became a visiting scholar in New York, engaging with scholars in sociology, philosophy, and literary theory.
• Johns Hopkins University (2000–present): In 2000, Das joined Johns Hopkins as Krieger–Eisenhower Professor in the Department of Anthropology, later serving as Department Chair (2001–2008). Her leadership expanded the department’s focus on ethnographic theory, visual anthropology, and interdisciplinary inquiry.

Major Theoretical Contributions

Structuralism, Caste & Ritual

In her early career, Das used the tools of structuralist analysis-popularized by founders like Claude Lévi‑Strauss and her mentor Srinivas-to examine caste configuration and ritual practice. Her studies of village life delved into how caste boundaries are maintained, how rituals organize social hierarchy, and how local meanings cohere to create social order.

Her doctoral work, in particular, highlighted how everyday ritual practices both reflect and reinforce larger social structures in rural India. These early writings established her as a rigorous fieldworker and adept theorist-someone who could bridge empirical ethnography and structuralist abstraction.

Shift Toward Anthropology of Violence & Social Suffering

The 1984 anti-Sikh riots in Delhi marked a turning point in Das’s intellectual path. Witnessing communal violence unleashed by the assassination of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, she recognized the limits of structuralist frameworks in explaining sudden eruptions of violence and collective trauma.

This realization led to her pioneering research into how violence and suffering are experienced, remembered, and narrated-or silenced-in everyday life. Her diptych of edited volumes, Mirrors of Violence (1990) and Social Suffering (co-edited 1997), brought together essays from India and beyond to explore violence from across the everyday spectrum.

• Mirrors of Violence collected survivor testimonies from Kerala state, Delhi, and Sri Lanka to “map suffering” inside its ordinary interactions.
• Social Suffering introduced the concept of suffering shaped by political, economic, and institutional processes-a way of understanding how violence imprints not just personal bodies but collective experience.

This shift marks Das’s contribution to a broader reorientation within anthropology: moving from structure toward themes of embodiment, testimony, and ethical encounter.

Major Theoretical Contributions

The Ordinary, Language & Violence

With Life and Words: Violence and the Descent into the Ordinary (2006), Das shifted focus from large-scale trauma to the quiet ways in which violence permeates everyday life. Using ethnographies of families in Calcutta affected by violence, she showed how ordinary conversations, silences, and gestures carry the weight of suffering. Drawing inspiration from Wittgenstein’s philosophy of language, she emphasized how shared forms of life shape what is sayable-and how what cannot be said bears its own social logic.

Affliction, Textures & Affect

Das continued this line with books like Affliction: Health, Disease, Poverty (2015) and Textures of the Ordinary (2020). In Affliction, she examines caregivers and families wrestling with chronic illness and poverty in poor urban settings, analyzing small daily practices-clinic lines, hygiene routines, caregiving-as sites where social suffering is narrated and performed. Textures of the Ordinary furthers this by bringing into view the aesthetic and emotional texture of everyday life, suggesting that anthropology must attend to affect, nuance, and sensory details.

Engaging Ethics, Slums & the State

Her most recent work, Slum Acts: Everyday Practices and Urban Poverty in India (2022), moves into how people live ethically under structural precarity. Drawing on research in Delhi slums, Das explores how residents navigate bureaucracy, negotiate access to services, and cultivate dignity amidst hardship. Here, the anthropology of the ordinary meets the anthropology of the state-not at the level of legislation, but in the minutiae of everyday life.

Methodologies & Key Concepts

1. Ethnography as concept building
   Das’s methodology is deeply generative: her detailed ethnographies create new theoretical terms-affliction, descent into the ordinary-rather than just applying preexisting frameworks.
2. Descent into the ordinary
   She promotes an analytic focus on the ordinary-rituals, speech, gestures-to uncover how violence is lived rather than merely recorded as rupture.
3. Listening to silences
   A key methodological insight is how silences, pauses, and contradictions speak louder than words in contexts of trauma and oppression.
4. Interdisciplinarity
   Das’s work bridges disciplines-anthropology, philosophy, linguistics, psychiatry, public health-evidencing a collaborative, polyvocal mode of inquiry.
5. Ethical attentiveness
   Her later work situates everyday life in moral encounters, affirming anthropology’s role in attending to dignity, agency, and reciprocity in marginal spaces.

Conclusion & Legacy

Veena Das has redefined what it means to be an anthropologist in the 21st century. From her early work on caste and ritual to her profound engagements with violence, affliction, and the everyday, her scholarship charts a journey from structure to the subtle, from public events to intimate suffering.

What sets Das apart is not only her theoretical innovation but her insistence that anthropology must remain attentive to the most vulnerable-those whose pain is often unheard, whose experiences defy bureaucratic language or analytic clarity. Her concept of the “descent into the ordinary” reminds us that violence is not always a spectacle; it often lives quietly in the mundane, in domestic spaces, in the language people do or do not speak.

Das’s work has had ripple effects across continents-from shaping how South Asian scholars approach Partition and political trauma, to influencing urban anthropology in Latin America, to creating space for dialogue between anthropology and philosophy. She has trained generations of students who carry forward her ethical, engaged mode of scholarship.

In an era marked by forced migration, ecological disaster, and ongoing political violence, her emphasis on listening, on witnessing, and on the moral textures of everyday life could not be more relevant. Whether in slums, clinics, homes, or state offices, Veena Das teaches us to see how ordinary people live extraordinary lives-and how anthropology must respond with humility, care, and rigor.

References

1. Review of Life and Words: Violence and the Descent into the Ordinary – University of California Press description and academic reviews highlight how Das integrates philosophical insights, especially Wittgenstein and Cavell, to understand violence woven into everyday life. https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/j.ctt1pprtk
2. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00856400701883032
3. https://hyderabadpsychologist.com/book-review-life-and-words-violence-and-decent-into-the-ordinary-by-veena-das/
4. https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/jar.65.1.25608185
5. Reviews of Slum Acts (2022) underline her ethnography in Delhi and Mumbai slums, the normalization of state violence in democratic contexts, and the concept of “inordinate knowledge”. https://doingsociology.org/2024/07/25/slum-acts-after-the-postcolonial-by-veena-das-2022-a-review-by-chakraverti-mahajan/
6. https://guardianbookshop.com/slum-acts-9781509537860/
7. Bibliographic and biographical information – early life, education, key positions, awards (Anders Retzius Gold Medal, honorary doctorates, AAAS, British Academy) – confirmed by academic profile and encyclopedia entries https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/721967