Dikshit Sarma Bhagabati

After six years of legal education, I have now segued into a PhD in Anthropology. My research focuses on how the marginalised express their own sovereign enunciations of human rights law that militate against the dominant tenets of the state, international organisations, aid workers, and lawyers. Instead of always teaching the marginalised how to participate better in the civil society, perhaps those legally and literarily trained should also learn from them sometimes.

To this end, my anthropological method seeks to displace law from its sanctuary in courtrooms and authoritative institutions to the humdrum of everydayness. Using fieldwork as a way of doing (postcolonial, jurisprudential, literary, ethnographic, and auto-ethnographic) critical theory, I am trying to situate a liminality where our critiques of human rights law and its renewed contemporary importance can mutually converse rather than diminishing each other.

When not occupied with my research, I find reading and writing slowly, for their own sake quite enjoyable—perhaps as much as the luxury of doing nothing.