Many governments and universities have pursued excellence by emulating world-class models and relying on international ranking schemes for validation and ideas for improvement. Others have relied on traditional notions of quality and research productivity. These approaches rely on the accumulation of wealth and talent – strategies that are “rivalrous” limiting the opportunities of others to be as effective. Focusing on portraits of eight different institutions reveals other approaches to excellence, all of which rely on defining and pursuing a purpose.

The School of Advanced Studies (SAS) is a liberal arts school within the University of Tyumen in Russia. Founded with financial support from a national excellence strategy, SAS models individualized learning and different ways of managing an institution. Its activites have already influenced the larger regional institution and attracting attention from other national universities. SAS also challenged the conventional view of the university’s role in preparing graduates for specific vocations, balancing that with a desire to be engaged with the region, its enterprises, and its government.

We have proposed in these pages to consider sacrificial violence as a singularity – in other words, as an object that eludes analysis and that can only be approached through examining the set of relations that are tied up in it.

We have seen how violence, in its exemplary form of sacrifice and in its generalised form of the ‘great sacrifice’ of war, is intertwined with social organisation. The latter is born of sacrifice in the myth of the first sacrifice. Reciprocally, for the royal sacrifice, each group assumes the function proper to its class, as created by this mythical account of the first sacrifice. This circular movement expresses a tautological ideology that posits sacrifice as the essence of organised life and, in return, sacralises its sacrificial reordering.

Through the consecration of the violence it operates within, sacrifice presents itself as a model of legitimate violence. This violence is openly exhibited and may be denied as violence or else declared necessary. This does not mean, however, that sacrifice represents a lesser violence aimed at containing generalised violence. On the contrary, it is magnified and propagated during the buffalo sacrifice. Nor does its legitimacy make it a violence that is not perceived as such, at least by some categories of people in the assembly. In the royal ceremony, at the same time as the sacrifice directs violence outside of the group, in the execution of the animal alter and then in the war which follows it, it also exerts violence within it, through a whole range of procedures that we have encountered throughout this text, such as by exclusion, victimisation or threat targeted at specific categories of people within the group. Sacrificial violence thus takes on a dual manifestation within the group from which it emanates – at once unifying and divisive, inclusive and exclusive, it is exerted upon the community, carving out its partitions only to unfold outside of them. It thus expresses social violence and political violence in the same movement, each containing the idiom of the other at its heart, recalling the sacrifice in ancient India, in which each constituent part contained the whole. In this manner, both social structure and political activity inter-construct each other through violence, which is itself conditioned by the form that sacrifice gives it.

Rubel was only eight or nine when he came to Dhaka. He took a train alone from the north, arrived at a station in the centre of the city and walked to a nearby bazaar where he has worked ever since. Memories of his family and village have blurred over the years, and today he is married with two children and stays in a basti (slum) elsewhere in the city. For people who have grown up on the streets of Dhaka, such stories are common. Some recall odd details of their home but have forgotten the name of their village and even family. Some ran away from poverty and cruelty, and described a widowed mother, a resentful stepparent, a neglectful father, mental illness, abuse at school or the madrasah. For some, the story of their arrival is bound up with a precise moment of fear, such as losing a prized asset and not daring to return home or a particularly brutal argument. For others, the streets have always been their home, growing up in makeshift shacks formed from tarpaulin sheets that dot stretches of pavement, and where even today some babies are born.

Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh, is one of the most densely populated cities on earth. People here live in a sprawling mix of apartment blocks, a few upmarket neighbourhoods and large bastis. Others skirt the edges of these in bazaars, transport terminals and pavements. Despite being one of the most populous cities on earth, it is little known in the so-called Global North, so much so that foreigners often pronounce it ‘Dakar’ after the Senegalese capital. As a city it is rarely deemed beautiful by outside eyes, unlike its iconic cousin Kolkata, nor does it boast obvious distinctions to draw tourists or wider interest. When Dhaka does appear in the world's media, it is sometimes in reference to its violent politics, the garment factories which sit at its edges or its frequent designation as one of the least liveable cities in the world. The only Western film to feature Dhaka – a recent Netflix production concerning the abduction of an Indian drug lord's son and a white mercenary hero – was filmed in India and Thailand, and its earlier title of ‘Dhaka’ scrapped for the more marketable Extraction.

Introduction

It is now accepted that the future of coal will be decided in the developing world. Even as Western countries transition away from coal, increased production and consumption of coal in India and China have meant that the share of coal in global energy production has remained constant for the past 40 years, despite attempts at decarbonization (Edwards 2019). Nevertheless, the West continues to produce high per capita emissions compared to developing nations (Lazarus and van Asselt 2018). In response, India has asserted its rights to equitable energy access in the international arena (Jaitly 2021). At the same time, questions of intra-country equity complicate India's position, with many arguing that India must pursue low-carbon pathways to protect its poor and vulnerable groups (Bidwai 2012).

After Independence, coal became an enduring symbol of national development in India (Lahiri-Dutt 2014). The coal industry has deep political roots, engaging powerful stakeholders at different levels (Bhattacharjee 2017). In recent years, coal investments have lost their appeal due to unrest over their environmental impacts as well as a dynamic downward trend in the demand for thermal power (Rajshekhar 2021). Even so, production targets for the state-owned Coal India Limited (CIL) – responsible for over 80 per cent of India's coal production – were increased to 1 billion metric tonnes by 2024. The central government is actively looking to sell more coal blocks to raise money, despite the lukewarm response to recent coal block auctions. Coal imports have simultaneously increased, engendering a new coastal coal geography controlled by private actors (Oskarsson et al. 2021). That renewables cannot substitute for coal, despite policy support from the state, is accepted. Analysts expect coal-fired generation to continue to grow to meet electricity demand growth even if 350 gigawatt (GW) of renewable energy (RE) capacity is installed by 2030 (Tongia and Gross 2019). New energy forms, including renewables, are, historically speaking, energy ‘additions’ rather than ‘transitions’ (Oskarsson et al. 2021). Importantly, this perception is not typical of India alone, as the global energy system remains locked into high coal energy use in the midst of an RE boom (Oskarsson et al. 2021).

The milestones of the anthropological approach to sacrifice have drawn a dead-end trajectory. Initially inspired by a desire to construct a unique and universal model of sacrifice through the identification of its scheme, to which Hubert and Mauss attached themselves, within a matter of decades the idea that the infinite variation of sacrifice eluded any attempts to conclusively define it imposed itself. It even led to the term ‘sacrifice’ being denounced entirely, on the grounds that it would artificially unify an enormous diversity of practices across the globe, as well as being too connected to a Christian heritage. Such a definitive denunciation of sacrifice was formulated by Marcel Detienne (1979: 34–35):

A few decades later, it appears that, unlike the notion of totemism, which effectively fell into disuse after its deconstruction by Claude Lévi-Strauss (1962), sacrifice is far from weakened by these remarks, nor has it even ceased to be used as a category of analysis by its author and those working in the field. Briefly put, the political history of the last three decades in particular has dramatically reintroduced sacrifice to modern anthropological thought.

As Ivan Strenski (2003) points out, the science of religions was initially uninterested in sacrifice, which was seen as an amoral and primitive practice. Following the first works of the English school, an essay on sacrifice by Henri Hubert and Marcel Mauss appeared in 1899, when its two authors were both 27 years old. The former was a history graduate, the second a philosophy graduate, and both shared a passion for ancient languages, notably Hebrew and Sanskrit, as well as for religious trivia.

Arguably, the Mahabharata is India's most influential political text. Kautilya's Arthashastra may seem a close contender, but it never attained the epic's social depth and was, in any case, forgotten for a millennium before its rediscovery in 1905. The Constitution of India certainly plays a more important role in shaping the modern Indian state, but, as a text, it hardly permeates popular consciousness in the way the Mahabharata does. For over two millennia, the Mahabharata has shaped Indian politics. It has nourished the statecraft of Hindu rajas and Mughal emperors, stirred anti-colonial nationalism and peasant rebellion, moulded Dalit–Bahujan and feminist activism. Beyond India, it has profoundly shaped political cultures across Southeast Asia, inspired pan-Asian thinking in China and Japan, activated the philosophical imagination of European and Arab thinkers, and conversed with Iranian nationalism.

Like one of its protagonists, the divine statesman Krishna, the Mahabharata exists in multiple avatars. The Sanskrit text, ascribed to Vyasa, coexists with versions in several Indian and extra-Indian languages. For many decades now, scholars have written about these textual traditions as well as about the popular appeal of Mahabharata stories. Historians, anthropologists, religious studies scholars, and philosophers have all written about the epic. Admittedly, much more has been said about the pre-modern lives of the Mahabharata than about its modern incarnations – but even on the latter the scholarship is rich and growing.

In this milieu, why is a new book needed about the epic? We offer two compelling reasons. First, there exists no single volume that engages with the Mahabharata's role in shaping modern social, political, and religious thought.

This chapter addresses how politics, epistemology, and modernity are co-produced, and, in this process, how the pre-defined notions of politics, epistemology, and modernity themselves are transformed and reconstructed. The emergent theoretical framing is empirically informed by the place-specific campaign against the aerial spraying of endosulfan pesticide wherein ‘life is cheaper than cashew’. The chapter highlights the structural connections between global capitalism and state-driven developmentalism but also how the very state was conscientized by the transverse solidarity of the ‘constituent power’, including the victims and the larger civil society as agents of modernity, the latter understood as resistance for egalitarianism. However, it does not stop there. We shall also touch upon the ‘epistemological break’ (Bachelard 1938; Althusser 1969) that has occurred in the larger context of knowledge controversies and conflicts (see Whatmore 2009).

In May 2010, the left-front government in the Indian state of Kerala took the historic decision to ban more than a dozen toxic pesticides in the state. This was the culmination of over a decade and a half of struggle and movements in protest against the aerial spraying of endosulfan on the state-owned cashew plantation in the northernmost district of Kasaragod. This chapter follows the prolonged struggle led by the victims of the deadly pesticide, the awakening of a general consciousness among the public, the building up of transverse politics and solidarity, and, finally, the persuasion of the state to ban the pesticide, along with other toxic wastes. The chapter is situated in the larger context of what Beck (1986), Habermas (1987), and Gaonkar (2001) would call risk society, a society in which modernity has become ‘a theme and a problem for itself’, and thus the crisis inherent in it is to be managed through a reinvention of politics. The chapter suggests that the concept of risk society and reflexive modernity as the outcome of a series of struggles and movements demanding the ban on endosulfan in the state offers fresh insights into the power of the people and the civil society in joining the victims.

Introduction

Political Islamism and Islamic reform in East Africa have many strands, but their most salient forms can legitimately be described as populist since they position Muslims in East Africa as ‘little people’ marginalized by a Christian establishment and rhetorically use this opposition for political mobilization (Becker 2006; Loimeier 2011; Mudde 2017). It is also evident that history matters to these populists since they have much to say about historical events. It is harder to decide whether this form of populism should be seen as right-wing or left-wing since it combines calls for economic justice with pronounced gendered inequality and extols political emancipation while remaining vague on its desired political dispensation (Becker 2016; Kresse 2007; Willis and Gona 2013). Moreover, the collective of marginalized Muslim ‘little people’ is internally highly diverse in its religious practices, cultural affiliations, and political views.

This chapter uses a mixture of interviews, sermon recordings, informal conversations, and participant observation to explore how Islamists define a place for Muslims in East Africa's difficult present using claims about the past, historical change, and the future. It examines claims about past greatness and present decline, the dangers and promises of the afterlife, and the difficulty of making futures in this world. While a sense of present hardship and loss of direction is practically omnipresent in this discourse, it contains diverse and sometimes contradictory tropes that different adherents combine flexibly. A distinctive feature is the attention to the domestic realm and gender relations as a site of struggle to live a good life.

This case study, then, seeks to complicate the notion that the appeal of populism lies in its ability to simplify societal problems, which sometimes comes close to suggesting that populism appeals to the simple-minded. It chimes with studies that emphasize tensions and slippages in religious populists’ claims and strategies (Hadiz 2014, 2016, 2018; Baykan 2019; Peker 2019). Populists do strive to use simple oppositions, but since they operate in a messy world, their attempts to simplify tend to create their own complexities. More fundamentally, the tropes of populism work because they can mean different things to different people; because they are polysemous, an effect that has been observed long before the current wave of populist mobilization (Dubow 1995).

The past few years have seen many kinds of inflation – among which there is an absolutely inflationary use of the word ‘populism’. Politicians, pundits, and, yes, also scholars tell us incessantly that we live in the ‘age of populism’ and that we are witnessing (or, for that matter, might be crushed by) a ‘populist wave’. The outcome of this inflation has been that many phenomena for which we have rather precise concepts – think of nativism, nationalism, and protectionism as obvious examples – are now labelled ‘populist’. This failure to distinguish impairs our political judgement. It has also arguably inflated the power of populism itself – it now appears that populism is omnipresent and that it is somehow an unstoppable political movement (after all, who can really stop a ‘wave’, let alone what Nigel Farage at one point called a ‘tsunami’?).

Against this background, one wonders whether looking for particularly populist approaches to history might not strengthen the unfortunate trend of conflating populism with all kinds of other phenomena. It is indeed problematic to label political positions that have, at best, an elective affinity with certain kinds of populism as populist as such; it is also misleading, in my view, to declare particular policies (let us say, on immigration or trade) populist as such. However, the case of history is different, and this volume shows why.

Populists, I hold, claim that they, and only they, represent what they often call ‘the silent majority’ or ‘the real people’. This appears to suggest no particular stance on policies nor, for that matter, commitment to any particular historical narratives. And yet this claiming of a monopoly of representation, usually phrased in moralistic language, does have two pernicious consequences, and these eventually also relate to the framing of history. First, and rather obviously, populists claim that all other contenders for power are fundamentally illegitimate. This is never just a disagreement about policies, or even about values, for that matter (which are, of course, normal and ideally even productive in a democracy); rather, populists say more or less directly that their political opponents are corrupt characters who are betraying the people (sometimes they label them outright as enemies).

Introduction

If, in writing history, we constitute the past and structure collective imagination, then the specific way we narrate the past becomes important in defining the shape of the national memory we produce and the vision of the nation that comes into being. This chapter looks at the way the Hindu right in India frames its history and envisions the nation. It suggests that we not only unpack the framing tropes of that historical imagination, but also the practices that reflect its attitude to the craft of history writing and the place of the historical profession within society. Populist regimes everywhere seek to refigure what counts as history.*

The internal dynamics of the Hindu right have always been shaped by a contradictory dialectic between constitutional politics and extra-constitutional activism, between the seemingly moderate and the aggressively militant voices. This conflict has unfolded differently over the decades. Through the 1950s and 1960s, the Hindu right could not expand its electoral base, though it continued its work at the popular level, opening schools where Hindutva history and Hindutva culture were popularised, doing social work, forming cultural and social organizations that were committed to the ideals of Hindutva. Even as late as 1984, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) was not able to win more than two parliamentary seats. Disappointed with electoral politics, desperate to expand its social base, many within the Hindu right felt the need for a militant movement to forge an aggressive Hindu identity. L. K. Advani emerged as the aggressive face of the right – leading the Ram Janmabhoomi movement in the late 1980s to build a temple for Rama, a major Hindu deity, in Ayodhya – and Atal Bihari Vajpayee appeared as the moderate voice. While Advani's efforts helped forge an assertive masculine Hindu identity, Vajpayee managed to form a coalition government in 1996.

In the early years of this century, during the time that Vajpayee was managing an embattled central coalition, Narendra Modi was fine-tuning a new militant Hindutva in Gujarat as the chief minister of the province. By 2014 he appeared as the unchallenged populist right-wing leader of India.

Alain Badiou points out that subjects become political when they create events – events as trans beings (see Hallward 2003; Badiou 2005, 2009) – even without the mediation of an agency. Badiou (see Hallward 2004) would also constantly remind us that what is important is post-eventual declaration: to quote Lisy Sunny, one of the Dalit woman leaders of Pombilai Orumai in Munnar, ‘[A]t least now we have a union of our own.’

The protests that rocked the Kanan Devan tea plantations, formerly Scottish James Finlay, in Kerala in 2015, led by the historic Pombilai Orumai – the women's unity – and later a parallel state-wide struggle spearheaded by the mainstream trade unions had been called off following what could best be described as mixed outcomes. While the plantation management has had to shift its position with regard to its decision not to increase the bonus or wages, the workers had to content themselves with a 30 per cent hike in wages as against their original demand for a 100 per cent increase. Yet the struggle has been path-breaking as it helped bring to light the harsh living and working conditions on the colonially evolved plantations. The company's claim that it ‘ranked No. 1 in the category [of] best company for employees’ involvement and participation in India’ and ‘featured among the 100 best companies to work [as per] its employees in India’ was exposed as an untruth. In fact, the observations made at the second All Kerala Thozhilali Sammelanam (All Kerala Workers’ Meet) held at Trichur in 1937 under the leadership of veteran communists including P. Krishna Pillai, N.C. Sekhar, R. Sugathan, and A.K. Gopalan, that of all the workers it was the plantation workers who suffered the most (see Raman 2010), remains true to this day – after nearly seven decades of Indian independence – with hardly a change in the historically evolved plantation-based patriarchal forms of exploitation/oppression.