Nepal is one of the few contemporary contexts where blood sacrifice is still a common, authorised and official practice, one which is closely associated with political power. As such, it forms an ideal framework for studying the relationship between sacrifice and violence, which is here considered in terms of a relationship between legitimate violence and transgressive violence.

In a stroke of fortuitous timing, my first visits to Nepal took place during the great buffalo sacrifices of the autumn. I thus found myself, due to politeness, unable to decline invitations and having to stand as close as possible to the scene, holding my camera close to my face like a screen to protect me from the violence of the spectacle and the spurts of blood which resulted from it.

Sacrifice and violence operate in this context in their most absolute form – killing – thereby diminishing the importance of the usual care needed in the use of these categories for wider meanings. Killing constitutes the core of violence, hiṃsā, for speakers of Indo-Aryan languages, who see in it its primary definition. It also forms the constituent act of blood sacrifice, bali dān, regardless of the intentions or logic behind it, the context in which it is performed or any practices which may come to take its place.

In the pages that follow, we shall reconsider the sacrificial device by considering it from its core trait of violence, which is so visible in the unfolding of the ritual itself and yet so hidden in the texts devoted to it. In order to do so, we will attempt to tread the tightrope between an analytical distance, which has often denied the violent nature of such rituals, and a sensitive proximity, which enables one to measure their importance but does not allow understanding the mindsets of those who perform them. One way of getting around these two pitfalls is to consider the sacrifice in terms of its framing and acting out of violence, how violence is transformed by the sacrificial rituals, but also how they themselves are transformed, either when caught up in a violent movement or, alternatively, when the legitimacy of their violence is contested. Nepal offers all of these possibilities.