Collaborations and Disclosures in Authoritarian Fields

The 2014 election of Narendra Modi and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government marked an epochal shift in Indian politics, both signaling the growing strength of the far-right Hindu nationalist movement as it achieved unprecedented state power and suggesting that profound changes to the state and the country were on their way. This chapter draws on our trajectories over the last decade as it attempts to chart links between India’s forest belt and Kashmir between 2009 and 2019. It traces the contours of the Indian state as its edges have sharpened and reflects on our own practices and self-presentations as fieldworkers. The “authoritarian field,” we suggest, is dialogic: state actors, non-state actors, and anthropologists are created and masked in relation to one another and in relation to the ideal, upper-caste Hindu and Hindu nationalist subject of the Indian state. A reflexive anthropology in such circumstances is one that not only considers the ethnographer’s positionality and their potential complicity with colonial or post-colonial states, but also recognizes the many para-ethnographic efforts being made by others, including states and movements, to pin down the ethnographer’s credibility.