The Social Life of Death on Delhi's Streets: Unclaimed Souls, Pollutive Bodies, Dead Kin and the Kinless Dead

ABSTRACT

How does the status of ‘street children’ in life inflect the narrative representation of their deaths? Street-dwelling children's interactions with death in North India reveal much about how their identities are produced in public domains. In this paper, I examine several instances of ‘homeless child’ death to illuminate the place of such subjects in society and urban space, and to interrogate the degree to which they can be rendered ‘recognizable’ or ‘grievable’, in Butler's (2010) terminology. In particular, I explore the presence or absence of kin in the ways that child death is narrated. I also explore the related question of how living ‘vagabond (aawara) children’ situate their status in narratives of death and loss. I conclude with discussions of how children negotiate their orientations towards death through ghost narratives, and of the space-, economy- and age-bound assignment of pollutive tasks once reserved for low castes to street-dwelling children.

KEYWORDS:

• Childhood
• death and dying
• India
• post-coloniality
• suffering
• homelessness

Acknowledgements

Thanks first and foremost to Khushboo Jain, my inimitable colleague and research assistant in India, who is responsible for so much insight. I am deeply grateful to my family for their support and insight across our several Delhi sojourns, and to my ruthless writing group, including Danilyn Rutherford, Benjamin Eastman, Vicki Brennan and Emily Manetta, along with Bruce Grant, who read and commented on a draft of this piece. I am indebted to the reviewers from Ethnos for their excellent insight and acuity. Thank you also to a panel and audience at the Society for Cultural Anthropology annual meeting in Providence, RI, who provided excellent feedback on an earlier incarnation of this paper, which they helped me abandon to start from scratch, and to all the advocates, activists and scholars in India whose daily work is constituted of all this. This research was generously supported by a multi-year grant by the US National Science Foundation (NSF-BCS-0924506), and received substantial further conceptual support from NSF Cultural Anthropology Program Director Deborah Winslow. Thank you finally, most deeply, to all the children, living and passed on, whose stories these are: you are owed.

Notes

1. Arshad elaborated upon his notion of the structurally produced risk of death in the (tall?) tale of another child's near-death situation, and his heroic role in it: ‘I'm going to tell you’, he said, ‘of another incident. A girl named Mahak came here very angry. A bottle-collecting girl. The Rajdhani was coming on this track, and the girl was standing right here. She tried twice to get on to the superfast express. She got on the train once. I was looking from a distance, I swear. She fell once, and once she succeeded in getting on. I caught her there. I got hold of her, she got mad at me. I asked why she ran away, she was all of 15.’

2. Risk is also read as susceptibility to forms of nonfatal harm and injury that mark forever the experience of vagabondage upon the body. At one point, Arshad told the story of a friend who ‘had an accident: one thigh got separated from the body. We sleep between two tracks. He slept with his legs on the train track and was sniffing double. So when the engine came, it blew his legs in two different sides. His one leg above knee had to be amputated.’ Likewise, Nabil, a Bangladeshi runaway I worked narrated a tale of the railway's inexorable mutilation of his body, wherein he too fell asleep on a track beside a seemingly inactive train that backed up to sever his arm at the shoulder, a corporeal marring evincing such shame he would not return home to see his mother.’

3. An interesting case for comparison is the story of the youth Shamsuddin, one of the children at the Jama Masjid, who burned himself alive in a feud over a lover. His death, and the public circulation of his coffin, became a matter of much wider public dispute. When Shamsuddin's corpse was delivered from the coroner, his family initiated Muslim funerary rites, but an NGO involved with him in life wanted to see media coverage; even after the ritual, at their urging, the body was not removed, a violation of proper Muslim practice. Bystanders grew distressed. The shroud was removed from Shamsuddin's face, and a fracas developed. No media came, but his death was rendered public spectacle, even fabular in its narration and its entwinement with elements of faith. It is the revelation of his face that holds the potential here to strip him of the dignity of personhood, and the hiding of the face is the practice tied with proper grieving and recognition before Allah. A public politics of Islam and associated notions of martyrdom, injustice and burial provide the conditions that make this possible. His face matters. At the very least, this suggests that even for a ‘vagabond’ who exists in the milieu of the homeless the status and proximity of kin is of primary import in the social life of death.