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.

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.

An ethnographic approach comparing how the festival of Dasaĩ unfolds in various ancient kingdoms of western Nepal reveals the unique elements particular to each site. It also reveals the way in which violence, order and disorder are combined in singular arrangements, like the various elements of a sort of transformative group which we can observe changing as we move across the country. The festival of Dasaĩ (The Ten Days) otherwise known as the Durgā pūjā (Worship of the Warrior Goddess) is an annual celebration which takes place during the first ten days of the clear fortnight of the month of Asoj (September–October). It is a combination of family celebration, a gathering of the bloodline and/or village, and a royal ceremony, so that the practices associated with each collective intertwine at different levels. The ten days of the ritual are divided into a preliminary phase lasting seven days dedicated to the worship of the Goddess and the reading of her Celebration, followed by two days of sacrifices, first of goats, in private houses and clan temples, and then buffaloes, which take place in ancient palaces and the great temples dedicated to the Goddess. The tenth day closes the rite, and is an occasion for the renewal of positions of power and hierarchical relationships, as a prelude to the final warlike rejoicings.

The reclusion of the first days

From its very beginning, the ritual suspends the ordinary passage of time. Throughout the country, all activities grind to a halt, with schools, universities, administrations, banks and most businesses closing for the duration of the festivities. Even the farmers interrupt their work in the fields, the only time they do so all year. The days before the ritual trigger a vast migration within the country, marked by the departure of three million people from the Kathmandu Valley alone.2 All over Nepal people huddle together in crowded buses, hoping to get back to their villages in time. The rite is a symbol of prosperity and abundance, marked by the distribution of the Dasaĩ kharca, the equivalent of a thirteenth month of pay for civil servants and to a ‘New Year's bonus’ for private employees. It

As a field of knowledge History is exceptionally interested in the particular and specific rather than the universal and general – it is primarily idiographic rather than nomothetic. It is also centrally concerned with change over time. These two characteristics make History fundamentally a storytelling discipline. Its findings are most often presented in narrative form. Of course, many books do not follow one narrative from cover to cover. But research findings are most often presented as stories – not as reports of particular key results (as, for example, in a scientific lab report) or as the results of statistical analysis. Nomothetic disciplines tend toward examining a relatively narrow set of features of multiple cases in order to create generalizing theories and establish laws of regularity that define what will happen under a given set of circumstances at any and all times and places. History instead usually aims to organize into a coherent interpretation many features of a single case, exploring in detail what happened at a particular time, in a particular place. It often also aims to give us a complex, multifactor causal explanation of why it happened as it did, but usually that causal explanation is embedded in the narrative.

The buffalo sacrifice is closely related to myth. It brings into being the Goddess's combat as described in her Celebration, the Caṇḍī pāṭh, and a recitation of the text is incorporated into the liturgy of the ritual. In its dual role as both a model for and an integral part of the sacrificial rite, the myth is doubly brought to life. Does it narrate the unfolding of the action? Or is it simply enough to read its contents in order to shed light on all the different aspects of the ritual? The answers to these questions will be proffered in the next chapter, which is devoted to a detailed description of the ten days of Dasaĩ, where the Celebration of the Goddess is conducted, as both a narrative and a sacrifice, during a holistic rite in which the organisational structure of society and the power of the chiefs are renewed. The rite therefore goes beyond the combat that it plays out, and summons other mythical models, models which present caste society and royalty as being the products of sacrifice. This broader framework must first be sketched out, without undertaking a textual analysis, but by considering how the myth manifests itself in everyday life in Nepal, in allusions or short stories, which form so many threads in the tapestry of the world which makes up ‘Brahmanic teaching’.

The recitation of the text by the Brahmin carries the same term, pāṭh, as that used for pedagogical teaching. In Nepal, this ‘teaching’ has long passed for a child's basic education, as these words of an old Rai make clear: ‘We did not know as much as today about the outside world. We had heard of Sri Lanka, Ayodhya, Benares and Badrinath from the Puranas. We believed the earth was flat and resting on water, held to the surface by the serpent Shesh Nag.’ In rural areas, it was not until the 1990s that a rationalist movement emerged among the Indigenous peoples, which targeted some of the contradictions and fantasies to be found in Hindu mythology. The movement then turned against the specialists of the myths, the Brahmins, recasting them as educated liars. And the Indigenous peoples reformulated Paul Veyne's famous question3 to ask: ‘Why did the Brahmins make us believe in their myths?’

To offer in sacrifice or to offer oneself in sacrifice are both rendered by the Nepali phrase ‘to offer a bali dān’, bali dān caḍāune. In this compound, dān designates the gift, while the meaning of bali is less well defined. It derives, according to the majority of the villagers I interviewed, from bal, which means ‘strength’. This is a popular etymology, far from its attested meaning in Sanskrit, where the term simply means ‘offering’. The local interpretation thus sheds light on sacrifice as it is understood in contemporary Nepal, as a ‘gift of strength’, through the death inflicted on a ‘breathing being’, prāṇi, whether it be animal or human. The phrase sometimes also applies to the sacrifice of plants, such as squash or coconuts, insofar as these are explicitly presented as substitutes for prāṇi beings.

Bali dān refers to death inflicted in two specific contexts: sacrifice and war. In the former, death is inflicted upon another being, while in warfare bali dān refers to the act of offering one's own life. At least, this is the meaning which prevails today. The more ancient, reciprocal version of this transaction in the context of war, where both killing and being killed were equated with sacrifice, no longer holds true. This reciprocity can still be found in the oral epics of western Nepal and is also found in a number of testimonies dating from the pre-unification period (before the nineteenth century), when the captured enemy was offered in sacrifice. For instance, a chronicle of the second half of the nineteenth century reports that in 1660, the king of Bhaktapur attacked a stronghold of the king of Kathmandu and captured twenty-one prisoners, whom he had beheaded as a sacrifice to the deities of his kingdom the following day (Wright 1877: 244). A century later, a Capuchin father also witnessed the offering of enemies at the temple of a goddess in the Kathmandu Valley. And the inhabitants of Pyuthan (mid-western Nepal) have to this day kept the memory alive of the old practice of collecting the enemy's blood in pokhāri, ritual ponds which are today filled with water but still have a sacrificial post staked in their centres.