Gathering Points: Blood Donation and the Scenography of National Integration in India

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Gathering Points: Blood Donation andthe Scenography of ‘NationalIntegration’ in India

JACOB COPEMAN

Abstract This article explores nationalist interpretations of blood donation activity, examining how someIndians read integrative messages into the practical procedures through which blood is donated and distrib-uted. The first post-Independence Prime Minister of India, Jawaharlal Nehru, proclaimed the need for‘national integration’ as a bulwark against a myriad of linguistic, caste and ethnic agitations that threatened

to disrupt the unity of the newly formed nation-state. This article shows that a striking manifestation of theNehruvian ideology of national integration possesses a compelling presence in the Indian blood donationmilieu. Scholars of India have long been preoccupied with documenting attempts by the Hindu right toredefine the nation in exclusively Hindu, anti-Nehruvian terms. Questioning the prevailing assumption thatthe only thing that counts politically in India today is the debunking or overriding of Nehruvian ideals of the secular inclusive nation, this article rehabilitates Nehruvianism as an important ethnographic subject. Inso doing it demonstrates the roles of anonymity, enumeration and an array of technical and imaginativegathering points in the formation of the ‘difference-traversing gift’. The article also highlights ways in whichtechnology may be employed for the imagining of social diversity.

Keywords anonymity, blood donation, enumeration, India, nationalism, Nehru, transfusion

The setting is a gleaming new charitable blood bank on the outskirts of Delhi. Adelegation from the Taiwanese blood service is visiting the blood bank as part of an itinerary connected to its attendance of a conference of the InternationalSociety of Blood Transfusion, which is being staged in a five-star hotel nearby in

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the centre of the city. The director of the blood bank, a middle-aged high-casteHindu with a reputation for causing his audience to weep during his speecheselaborating the manifold virtues of voluntary blood donation, is proud of thecutting-edge technology his blood bank employs, exclaiming to the delegation:‘We are now using blood component therapy to rationalize and to optimize.’Blood component therapy splits whole donated blood according to the relativegravity of its constituent components – principally red cells, platelets and plasma– thereby enabling more recipients to be treated from a single donated unit, whilealso allowing patients to be treated for the specific ailment from which they aresuffering. The doctor continued: ‘We give and our life is now within four others

– we are next to god, this is saintly and divine practice.’ Plasma has no bloodtype, so can be pooled, though this is a controversial practice because it canspread infection. But this is exactly what the doctor then went on to propose –a ‘universal plasma’ supply, as he put it, made up of all the world’s differentpopulations. Such a microcosmic gathering up of the world in a vat – the poolingof plasma from around the globe – would act as an ‘agglutinative force’ (Laclauand Mouffe, 1985: 37): ‘One blood supply to show we are all one body’, exhortedthe medic. While the present article largely concerns national rather than supra-national images of integration, what this doctor’s vision demonstrates so well, toparaphrase Waldby and Mitchell (2006: 30–3), is how the biotechnical leverage of excorporated tissues can enable the human body’s productivity to be sutured notonly into the productivity of markets but also into productive national andsupranational imaginings.

This article explores physical gatherings of heterogeneity – gatherings bothimagined and actual, and at a variety of scales, from internationally sourced plasmain vats to the differential composition of a migrant labour force – as a criticalcomponent of an Indian political aesthetic of integration which such gatheringsare understood to both signify and produce. The focus is on the role of whatmight be termed ‘congregative thought’ within a variety of Indian actors’ imag-inings of the Indian nation as a coherently functioning ‘bounded aggregation’(Segal and Handler, 1992: 3). As the image of a universal plasma supply suggests,

blood donation practices are particularly amenable to congregative thought. Thisis because of blood donation’s characteristic systemic properties of gathering anddisbursal. Indeed, this article demonstrates that the transactional chain of blooddonation as it manifests in India – the successive stages of procurement, treatment,storage and distribution – entail convergences of people and things which havecome to be indivisible from the high politics of the nation and its nurturance.1

The political philosophy of Jawaharlal Nehru, the first Prime Minister of India,is out of fashion, both in academic circles and in the Indian public arena. This

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article, however, argues that reports of the death of the Nehruvian vision of Indiahave been much exaggerated and that the central Nehruvian ideal of ‘nationalintegration’ – hitherto overshadowed in scholarly treatments by the relatedconcept of ‘secularism’ – has, through complex imaginative processes connectedto physical and ideational points of ‘gathering’, retained a strong and enduringpresence in the field of voluntary blood donation.2

The gathering point is a key component of what I call the ‘scenography’ of national integration.3 A term originating in theatre, ‘scenography’ refers to thework of constructing, adapting, transforming and filling a dramatic space. Thestandard scenography of national integration in India consists of the bringing

together of people of different states, linguistic regions, religions or castes in asingle place – in this way, a variety of actors seek to produce striking depictionsof the nation in microcosm. Such choreographed gatherings or ‘spatial concen-tration[s]’ (Marriott, 1989: 21) of different communities may be understood tobe political acts of composition intended to display and nurture a sense of unityin diversity.4 What I seek to show is that medics and donors view the physicalprocesses which constitute what doctors sometimes call ‘the vein to vein chain’as particularly suited not only to express the Nehruvian ideology of nationalintegration but to generate it as a living reality. From the originating blood collec-tion event – known as a ‘camp’, or in Hindi, ‘shibir ’5 – a bringing together of people often from diverse origins, through to the transfusion, a centring of severaldiversely sourced units of blood, the chain consists of various points of gatheringor ‘integration’. Both doctors and donors see ‘indicative continuities’ (Strathern,2005: 67) between these moments of assembly and the Nehruvian nationalisttenet that heterogeneous societal interests must be both recognized and ulti-mately be made to fold into a single social field, that of the Indian nation as aunitas multiplex (Luhmann, 1990: 68).6 What blood donation allows is thegeneration of microcosmic integrative images at a variety of scales. The severalscales of gathering at which Nehruvian logics are reproduced demonstrate thatNehruvian conceptualizations of national integration do not merely persist withinblood donation processes, but are also being recreated and reasserted through

them. As I explain below, the choreography of microcosmic gatherings is a familiarone, but its replication at different levels and locales suggests a new creativethrust at the heart of Nehruvian logics. Given the supposed death of all that isNehruvian in contemporary India, this point requires particular emphasis.

A particularly important feature of the scenography of integration just de-scribed is the enumeration of the differential components of the gatheringsinstantiated. Such enumerations devolve from (but are not the same as) a set of enumerative practices enacted in both pre- and post-Independence India through

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which, in the words of Kapila: ‘social diversity was imagined and governmental-ized along religious, ethnic and linguistic axes’ (2008: 120). Cohn (1987), Kaviraj(1989), Chatterjee (1996) and others have drawn attention to the importance of enumeration as an instrument of the colonial rule of India. They point in particu-lar to the recording and delineation of caste identities in successive censuses. Forthese scholars, control took the form of ‘enumerating the diverse communitieswhich, in the colonial imagination, comprised the society over which they hadbeen destined by history to rule’ (Chatterjee, 1996: 285). Cohn (1987: 224–54)notes that caste and religion became the ‘sociological keys’ to the ‘numericaldescription’ of Indian society. The enumeration of diverse communities continues

to be performed for the purposes these scholars describe, the formalization of community distinctions having led to competition between these groupings inseeking access to state resources (Chatterjee, 1996: 285). These scholars rightlyconnect ‘state’ and ‘statistics’ (see Lal, 2002), but their monologic focus on therole of enumeration in formalizing what had previously been ‘fuzzy’ communities(Kaviraj, 1989), and on the competition between these newly identifiable interestgroups, has resulted in a direct and singular equation between enumeration onthe one hand, and reification and fissiparity on the other. What has in conse-quence been overlooked hitherto is another important aspect of enumeration: itsrole in the formation of visions of a differentially composed and yet harmon-iously functioning national life.

Recent accounts by Peabody (2001) and Guha (2003) have been more nuancedin their approach to the question of enumeration, presenting evidence of bothpre-colonial modes of community enumeration and of the active role played bycommunities themselves in formulating self-descriptions. The present article, Ihope, complements those of Peabody and Guha in demonstrating that analysisof the telling aspects of enumerative processes in the subcontinent is by no meansexhausted by those studies that, as Guha (2003: 162) puts it, focus upon ‘the warm,fuzzy continuum of pre-modern collective life [being] suddenly and arbitrarilycut up by colonial modernity’. As the examples below attest, numerical descrip-tion has also come to form a key component of the scenography of integration.

Structures of Procurement

Recent legislation initiated by the Indian medical establishment has banned bloodbanks from accepting blood on the basis of payment to individual donors andalso seeks to end the prevailing ad hoc family-based system of provision wherefamily members donate to replace the blood withdrawn from the blood bank totreat their ailing relative. The public policy orthodoxy informing the legislation


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asserts that the safety of donated blood is far greater when deriving from volun-tary, non-remunerated donors in an anonymous system of procurement.7 Thisorthodoxy is supported and maintained by the international arbiters of healthpolicy and funding, the World Health Organization (WHO) and the InternationalFederation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, both of which subscribeto the findings of influential British policy analyst Richard Titmuss (1970), thatvoluntary blood donation provides the safest blood for transfusion.

India’s Supreme Court banned paid donation from 1 January 1998 and directedthe government to begin actively encouraging voluntary, non-remunerated blooddonation. The government’s subsequent National Blood Policy (2002) addition-

ally required the phasing out of the family-based replacement system within fiveyears.8 The banning of paid donation, and the phasing out of replacement dona-tion, has required innovative strategies on the part of blood banks, supported bythe government body the National AIDS Control Organization (NACO), toradically increase voluntary blood donation.9 Thus far, however, the campaignshave not been particularly successful: replacement donation still accounts for morethan 50 percent of all donated blood in India. There are striking state-by-statevariations: in West Bengal, 90 percent of donations are voluntary. Maharashtra,Gujarat and Chandigargh also possess healthy voluntary figures. In Delhi, how-ever, less than 19 percent of the total collection comprises voluntary donation.The generally low voluntary figures are partly accounted for by the apprehen-sion, widespread in the subcontinent, that blood donation results in the drainingaway of one’s strength and a permanent volumetric deficit. This was frequentlyexpressed to me during fieldwork in the formulation: ‘If I donate blood, then Iwill need a transfusion, so why should I donate?’ For this reason, blood bankslay great stress on the recuperative power of the substance, comparing blooddonation to having one’s hair or nails cut: blood, they say, like these other detach-able substances, re-forms and returns.

There are three main types of blood bank: government, NGO and commer-cial. Government and commercial blood banks tend to be attached to hospitals,whereas NGO blood banks – the two that operated in Delhi at the time of my

ethnographic research are run respectively by the Indian Red Cross Society andthe Rotary Club – tend to be ‘stand-alone’. It was with these latter two bloodbanks, Delhi’s most energetic organizers of camps and solicitors of voluntarydonors, that I worked most closely during fieldwork.10 Theoretically, one candonate voluntarily at any blood bank, though only government and NGO bloodbanks are allowed to take donor beds to donors, that is, to conduct voluntaryblood donation camps at different locations. In Delhi, the Red Cross, Rotary andLions blood banks, along with a smattering of government institutions, conduct


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camps in collaboration with corporate, educational, religious and political organiz-ations, often at venues convenient to donors (for example, in their places of workor worship). The blood donation camp is an extremely variable social form.Those conducted in corporate offices can be dull and routine, with quiet, orderlyemployees queuing to donate. On the other hand, those staged by north Indiandevotional orders in the sant tradition are frequently conducted on a gargan-tuan scale amidst great devotional fervor (see Copeman, 2008, 2009). This articlefocuses on a further, very particular variety of Indian blood donation camp: thekind that results from political acts of composition in order that they becomesituational enactments of the Nehruvian post-Independence ideology of national

integration.A further key contextual aspect of the ideology and practice of voluntary blood

donation in India concerns its ambiguous relationship with the progressive liber-alization of the Indian economy from the late 1980s onwards. On the one hand,the elimination of paid donation in favour of the non-remunerated variety appearsto run counter to the prevailing trend in Indian public life, whereby the terms of debate about market reforms are limited ‘to largely those positions which alreadypresuppose globalization and liberalization as enabling frameworks for positivechange in the economy and in society at large’ (Chopra, 2003: 421). From thisperspective, non-remunerated blood donation constitutes a domain apart: thegovernment ban on paid donation, which was meant to remove a swathe of paiddonor petty capitalists from the donor pool, represented a genuine attempt to‘de-commodify the commodity’ (Tober, 2001: 157). Yet non-remunerated blooddonation seems to both challenge and to partake of what Cohen (1999: 140) hascalled ‘the current order of the commoditization of everything’, for there isevidence that, far from constituting a counter-domain to market logics, volun-tary donation has been made into a vehicle for their extension and deepeningpenetration. For example, several Delhi blood banks ‘sell’ blood donation as aproduct to donor-consumers, who are encouraged to donate in order to improvetheir health, to attain discounted health insurance or other material benefits (seeCopeman, 2009). This is indicative of the generation of an environment in which

solutions to problems (the problem in this instance being a shortage of voluntarydonors) must always be market based.Moreover, economic liberalization provides the spaces that blood banks seek

to tap in order to bolster the project of voluntary donation. Blood banks in Delhiconcerned with promoting voluntary donation actively solicit the ‘cleaner’ bloodof the comparatively well off. Indeed, the urban middle classes are now widelythought of as ideal blood donors, and blood banks stage donation camps insuch places as shopping malls and the premises of multinational corporations;


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i.e. institutions that are the direct offshoots of economic liberalization. As thehonorary director of a Delhi blood bank, a retired policeman, put it me: ‘We goout in the van to middle-class areas and shopping malls so as to get safe, healthydonors. No slum dweller’s or poor person’s blood is allowed.’ What is happeningis more complex than a simple movement from lower-class (paid) to middle-class(voluntary) donors,11 but if liberalized spaces are increasingly the spaces fromwhich ‘well-off’ blood is procured, then it might be argued that liberalizationprovides an enabling role in regard to the implicit class-based dimension of theswitch to voluntary donation. This, when added to the ways in which, in Delhiat least, market logics subtly dethrone the ‘non-remunerated’ nature of the gift

of blood, suggests that there are several points of confluence and mutual supportthat connect voluntary blood donation and economic liberalization.

A further point of confluence is discernible. The dismantlement of the Nehru-vian planned economy – the withdrawal of the state from its role as principaloverseer of production – has led to the increasing integration of India into theworld economy. A concomitant of this is ideological integration on a macro-policy level that affects healthcare as much as it does more narrowly fiscal domainsof governance.12 My argument is simply that the Indian government’s acceptancein 1998 of WHO and International Red Cross norms concerning the superiorityof voluntary over paid and replacement blood donation forms part of the samedynamic whereby it also accepted the structural adjustments demanded by theIMF and World Bank concerning the lowering of taxes and tariffs on imports.The latter prescriptions were an important stimulus to the creation of the verymiddle-class consumerist ideology that would demand better than a second-rateblood service. Indeed, such a service, based on paid and replacement donations andwith extremely high infection rates, would be an embarrassment to an assertivelymodern aspiring global power. (One might add that the switch to a voluntarysystem is also currently under way in liberalizing China – see Erwin, 2006; Erwinet al., this issue).13 So, in an albeit oblique sense, liberalizing policies were acontributing factor in the legal installation of a non-remunerated system of blood procurement. An important, seemingly ironical, point follows, which is

that the dismantling of the Nehruvian planned economy has been to the advan-tage of the Nehruvian ideology of national integration, since it is within thedomain of voluntary blood donation that such an ideology is being reproducedafresh and with renewed vigor. This point requires emphasis. As I show below,the anonymity of voluntary blood donation – i.e. non-knowledge in respect of those to whom one gives and from whom one receives – and the camp-gatheringsfrom which voluntarily donated blood is procured are fundamental conditionsof possibility for the Nehruvian nationalist imaginings this article documents.


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Counter-Nehruvian liberalization was instrumental in marginalizing a family-based replacement system lacking in both attributes.14 The disassembly of theNehruvian planned economy can thus be said to have had productive conse-quences for Nehruvian ‘national integration’.

Gifts to M/any

Whereas in the replacement system several donors are asked to give to a specificperson (usually a relative), donors in the voluntary system meant to supersede itare required to give as an act of high-minded citizenship, their recipient being an

anonymous ‘any’ rather than a specified known individual. Voluntary donorsare thus being asked to imagine their blood travelling in the way that the tech-nology of blood component therapy operates on the blood they donate. As wasmentioned above, much donated blood is separated via a laboratory process intoits constituent components. This involves its rotation at high speed, therebycreating centrifugal forces which move the substances being treated in an outwarddirection. Anonymously donated blood mirrors the technological procedure,travelling as it does in an external or outward direction away from the donor tounnamed recipients whose identities cannot be specified or known. The directionof travel is precisely the reverse in the replacement system, in which a circle of donors, usually family members, all focus their donation inwardly, i.e. centri-petally, on the needs of a specified, known individual recipient.15 I thus refer tothe underlying principle of donation in the replacement system as ‘centripetal’ indirection, and to that of the voluntary system, now being promoted, as ‘centri-fugal’. The transition itself that is under way between the two systems alsopossesses a centrifugal structure: from being given narrowly to someone in thereplacement model, blood is now aimed more widely at anyone.16 I use the term‘m/any’ as shorthand to describe those aspects of the voluntary system in whichdonors think of themselves as giving both to an unnamed ‘any’ and at the sametime to a pluralized ‘many’.

A key aim of this article is to demonstrate how the anonymous conditions

of voluntary blood donation play an important role in Nehruvian nationalistconceptualization.17 Such conditions create a kind of blank page which permitsdonors to engage in imaginative acts of enumeration in regard to possible futurebeneficiaries; such acts, I suggest, are critical to the nationalist reckonings of integration that are discussed below. A further critical aspect of the complexmoral significance of anonymity relates to its normalizing entrenchment of theboundary-crossing gift. Biological exchange frequently results in highly sym-bolic ‘boundary crossing acts’ (Simpson, 2004: 851) into which much unifying


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significance is read. Simpson (2004: 851) gives the example of the donation by aSri Lankan Buddhist priest of a kidney to a Christian woman. In India, too, muchattention is focused on the boundary-crossing aspects of biological exchange. Forinstance, a recent news report highlighted the capacity of corporeal transfers toprovoke integrative interpretations on a geo-political scale. In 2004 a Pakistanichild was brought to Chennai for an eye operation during which he received acorneal graft from an Indian donor. The headline read: ‘Today an Indian Eye WillBlink in Pakistan’, the suggestion being that the partition of India and Pakistanwas annulled on the level of the child’s body – that the operation represented thecovert moral reconquest of a lost territory. The varieties of person subject to

‘integration’, in these examples, are known: Pakistani/Indian; Buddhist/Christian.In contrast to these examples, the reporting of which emphasizes the exception-alism of the boundary-crossing act by virtue of the differences between donorand recipient being known, what anonymity enables is every such corporealtransfer to be potentially ‘boundary-crossing’. It is the non-availability of know-ledge in respect of to whom one gives and from whom one receives that producesthe imaginative spaces of enumeration and traversal to which I have referred;thus does the normative non-availability of knowledge entrench and make non-exceptional the difference-traversing gift.

The Life of ‘National Integration’ and its Attendant ScenographyAfter the first serious communal riots of post-Independence India in Jabalpurin 1961, Nehru convened a National Integration Conference at Vigyan Bhavan,New Delhi. Inaugurated by President Dr S. Radhakrishnan, it was attended byeducationalists, scientists, Chief Ministers and Union Ministers, the aim being toformulate methods that would be effective in countering communalism, ‘casteism’,and regional and linguistic separatist movements. Soon after the conference, aNational Integration Council was constituted which still sits today.18 The Ministryof Home Affairs, which has a special division for the promotion of national inte-gration, organizes an annual National Integration Day, and on the death anniver-

sary of Indira Gandhi, it awards the Indira Gandhi Prize for National Integrationto public figures thought to have contributed to the nurturance of this ideology.19

Nehru’s identification of the need to foster national integration reflects the factthat ‘there is no ideological or cultural guarantee for a nation to hold together’(Khilnani, 1997: 207). The idea of an India ‘united into a single political com-munity’ (1997: 5), capable of containing immense internal diversity, requirespersistent cultural effort in order to be maintained, and the continual emphasisin India on national integration, or alternately ‘unity in diversity’ (anekta me ekta),


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in its seeking to overcome the potential for national fracture (further partitions,separatist agitations, etc.), continually admits its possibility. The great ‘DepressedCaste’ leader B.R. Ambedkar wrote in the 1940s that:

There is no nation of Indians in the real sense of the word, it is to be created. In believing thatwe are a nation, we are cherishing a great delusion. How can people divided into severalthousands of castes be a nation? The sooner we realize that we are not as yet a nation, in thesocial and psychological sense of the word, the better for us. (1989: 67)

Nehru’s attempts to foster a sense of national integration, in seeking to counterAmbedkar’s vision of division and fissure, implicitly recognized its validity.

The phraseology of national integration is extremely prevalent in Indian publiclife, and is put to work in diverse situations. The construction of new highwaysis promoted in government newspaper advertisements as a project of nationalintegration; concert series in New Delhi, made up of performers from the differ-ent states of the country, are designed ‘to promote the cause of national integra-tion’. A Class X exam paper from 1997, displayed on the Times of India website,shows that schoolchildren had to answer the question: ‘What is meant byNational Integration?’20

Religious movements also profess to seek to foster national integration. Auniversity run by the north Indian Radhasoami devotional order, for example,delivers courses that seek to ‘ingrain . . . a sense of national integration’ (Juergens-meyer, 1991: 162). In his analysis of the Indian comic book series Amar Chitra Katha, Hawley (1995) shows how the ideology of national integration is read backinto the lives of the great sages and saints in Indian history. Kabir, for instance,is billed as ‘the mystic who tried to bring the Hindus and the Muslims together’(1995: 120). The integrative message of these comics stops short of espousingresistance to inequality, instead preaching common origins and ‘gentle amalgam’(1995: 127). In her study of the relationship between Hindu gurus in Rishikeshand the ideology of Hindutva, McKean (1996) goes further in viewing ‘nationalintegration’ as a dogma deployed by gurus in order to disguise violent domin-ation by ‘ruling-class groups’ (1996: 272).21 Though the somewhat tendentious

suggestion would seem to be that because some Hindu nationalist activists valorizenational unity and integration, anybody who speaks of these concepts must be aHindu nationalist, McKean’s study is useful in drawing our attention to thestrikingly prevalent usage of this terminology among both guru movementsand Hindu nationalist organizations. In March 2006, for example, the leader of the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), L.K. Advani, undertook a‘National Integration Yatra’ (pilgrimage) around India to try to restore his party’sflagging fortunes. So Hindutva organizations have long used an assertively


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counter-Nehruvian version of national integration to project an exclusive Hinduvision of the nation.

In the light of such Hindu nationalist redefinitions of national integration, aswell as the cementing of liberalization at the heart of the state’s economic agenda,several scholars have pointed to a supposed withering away of Nehruvian modelsof integration. Cohen, for instance, asserts that the Nehruvian integrative vision,‘in cinema as elsewhere, now seems passé’ (2001: 15). Similarly, the political successof groups espousing Hindu nationalist ideologies of exclusive Hindu identity hasled Rajagopal (2001: 272) to view ‘Nehruvianism’ as amounting to a set of prin-ciples ‘observed largely in the breach rather than an active working policy’. There

is much evidence that lends credence to these arguments, and Sheth (1996: 321)is somewhat persuasive in suggesting that ‘national integration’ has in large partbeen divested of its egalitarian content and is infused with a vertical brand of majoritarian nationalism.22 And yet, the evidence I present here that the Nehru-vian ideology of national integration enjoys a presence of important dimensionsin the field of voluntary blood donation, suggests that, though its meaning iscontested, it is a more tenacious mode of conceptualization than some scholarsallow for.

The Times of India website provides a sample answer to the 1997 exam paper,mentioned above, in which the definition of national integration is given as‘assimilation but not extinction, synthesis but not non-existence, solidarity butnot regimentation of the many segments of the people in a territorial sover-eignty’.23 As was mentioned earlier, a particular scenography of national integra-tion is enacted according to which people of different states, linguistic regions,religions or castes (representing ‘the many segments of the people’) are broughttogether in a single place (representing a ‘territorial sovereignty’). The IndianMinistry of Youth Affairs and Sports provides an example. Referencing ‘religiousfundamentalism’, ‘linguistic diversities’ and ‘age-old caste system’, the ministryclaims that such factors ‘pose a serious challenge to India’s unity and integrity andtherefore conscious efforts will have to be made by all concerned to preserve thesame’. Its scheme for the Promotion of National Integration envisages National

Integration Camps, designed:. . . to provide the youth from different parts of the country and from diverse religious andcultural backgrounds a common platform to interact with each other, know each other’s customsand lifestyles, to work together in community welfare projects and in the process make themaware of the underlying unity amidst diversity.

A key condition for the ministry’s funding of such camps is that ‘at least 25% of the participants would have to be drawn from a minimum number of five states


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representing some linguistic and cultural diversity’.24 A news article on one suchNational Integration Camp, staged in Chennai, reports that volunteers hailed‘from 11 states including Assam, Meghalaya, Maharashtra, Tripura, ArunachalPradesh, Mizoram, Orissa, Manipur, Sikkim, Kerala and Tamil Nadu’.25 Thusdoes the scenography of integration entail gathering together representatives of India’s diverse constituent populations in single spaces.

The scenography stretches back to the early days of Independence. Forinstance, an annual Folk Dance Festival was instituted in New Delhi at theRepublic Day celebrations of 1953, which showcased folk dances from across thecountry (Tarabout, 2006: 197). The event was a political act of composition

arising out of an early incarnation of congregative thought. As Nehru is reportedto have declared: ‘The idea of several folk dancers from different parts of Indiacoming to Delhi brings home to them and to all of us the richness of our culturalheritage and the unifying bond which holds it together’ (cited in Tarabout, 2006:197). Parry (2003: 226) provides a further example in his work on Indian indus-trial labour, noting that a regionally heterogeneous migrant labour force at thegovernment steel plant in Bhilai arose from a recruitment policy which reflected‘the post-independence ideology of national integration. It was the new India thatwas being built in Bhilai.’ It should by now be clear that the recruitment policywas enacting a familiar scenography.

Further, as the Bhilai recruitment policy and the National Integration Campsattest, and as will further be demonstrated below through examples drawn fromblood donation processes, what Kapila (2008: 120) aptly calls the ‘governmental-ization of difference’ – state practices of classification and enumeration tied tominority recognition, the granting of entitlements and the state’s pluralistic self-image – may evoke not merely fixity and recognition-based fissiparity, but alsopromissory narratives of integration and cohesiveness. This is the case becausecommunities need to be distinguished and enumerated in order to be able to begathered together in microcosmic visions of a national unitas multiplex. This,indeed, is the irony of enumeration. Just as Cohn (1987) suggested in his classicwork on the census, enumeration does politicize identity and involve processes

of reification: diversity exists on different levels, and the calling forth of differ-ent state and/or religious representatives at National Integration Camps deniesthe internal diversity of the represented ‘community’ in order to make a claimabout diversity on a different level (that of the nation) (see Greenhouse, 1996:230). At the same time, enumeration is emphatically the condition of congrega-tive thought – it is precisely because identities have been defined and made count-able that promissory images of a national ‘holding together’ become possible.26

Enumeration, then, contains dual tendencies towards reification and promissoryholdings together.


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The ‘Holding Together’ of Camps

As places of assembly and convergence, blood donation camps are a spatial formthat comes ready-made for interpretations emphasizing their capacities for pro-moting national integration. Having seen that the Ministry of Youth Affairs andSports actively solicits the participation of distinct communities in its NationalIntegration Camps, I show now how blood donation camps can be utilized incomparable ways. As was noted above, it is helpful to view such camps, purpose-fully constructed to enact spatial concentrations of different communities, as politi-cal acts of composition intended to display and nurture a sense of unity in diversity.

For my first example of a blood donation camp’s ability to hold togetherdiverse constituents, I turn to the Dera Sacha Sauda devotional movement of north India, holder of the Guinness world record for most blood donations madein a single day (12,002 units).27 The scale of the devotional order’s two record-breaking camps, held in Sirsa (2003) and Sri Gurusarmodia village (2004) respec-tively, required very particular organizational arrangements. Since the quantitiesof units to be collected would far exceed local requirements, it was necessary forthe Dera Sacha Sauda to invite blood bank collection teams from distant regionsof the country. Fifty blood banks in total attended the 2004 camp, hailing fromthe states of Delhi, Haryana, Punjab, Rajasthan, Jammu, Gujarat and AndhraPradesh. For these camps, then, Sirsa and Sri Gurusarmodia became points of

confluence with not only pilgrims but also blood banks from multiple originsconverging in a single centre. The corollary, of course, is the taking back of bloodcollected in singular centres to multiple destinations. A centripetal movement toa centre was thus followed by a centrifugal movement away from it. The lattermovement creates a sense of the Dera Sacha Sauda guru, Hazoor Maharaj Ji, asan indispensable benefactor of the nation, while also resembling something likea royal progress by proxy, the guru marking the nation through distribution of the blood donated in Sirsa, ‘like some wolf or tiger spreading his scent throughhis territory, as almost physically part of them’ (Geertz, 1983: 125). The formermovement, conversely, constructs Sirsa as a gathering point of national multipli-city. The local media in Haryana enumerated the states represented at the 2004

camp, describing it as a truly great example of anekta me ekta (unity in diversity).28

Recalling the record-breaking camp in Sirsa in 2003 in which he had takenpart, a Delhi blood bank director told me:

. . . 16,000 people attempted to donate blood [several thousand being declared ineligible formedical reasons]. It can definitely lead to national integration. Fifty-two blood banks camefrom all over India: from Jammu and Kashmir, Rajasthan, Gujarat. . . . So on the one hand,technical experts came from different states. On the other hand, blood from Haryana statewent to many states outside.


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On World Blood Donor Day 2004 (14 June), the Delhi chapter of the IndianSociety for Blood Transfusion and Immunohaematology (ISBTI) held a sympo-sium on the theme of ‘Quality Standards’.29 It included a panel discussion at whicha member of the audience asked whether the insurance cards issued to voluntarydonors are valid in all Indian states. Since sectors of Delhi are located in the statesof Uttar Pradesh and Haryana, respectively, the question was locally pertinent.The panel, comprising blood bank personnel from the corporate, governmentand NGO sectors, was unsure of the answer, but one doctor strongly supportedthe idea:

This could go a long way in improving voluntary blood collection in India, because in theWestern world there’s a system of national directories where every donor gets a nationalnumber, and that card is valid, honoured and accepted anywhere you go across the country.But here there is only fragmentation. There was a camp in December [2003] in Sirsa wherepeople from 50 blood banks came and 15,000 units were donated in one day and blood banksfrom as a far as Ahmedabad and Jammu and Shimla were there. This was a very fine venturefor national integration, for practical secularism. Through these thoughts which come throughblood donation, I think we can go a long way in improving several things.

Many blood donation camps, of course, are far less heterogeneously composed– camps staged at colleges are attended by the students in residence there; thosestaged at corporate offices are populated by the professionals who work there,and so on. However, like the National Integration Camps discussed above,attempts to secure the presence of people from distinct regions or communitiesoften form an integral part of a blood donation camp’s planning. At the Nasikkumbh mela30 in 2003, for instance, Muslims in the Samajwadi political partyorganized a blood donation camp. The party’s state general secretary MushirSayyed declared that the camp was ‘for the benefit of the millions of pilgrimsconverging here. . . . We are planning to help anyone with road directions,drinking water, etcetera. The blood camp is to promote national integration.’31

The presence of pilgrims from multiple origins, held together at a single point anddonating in concert at a Muslim-organized camp, strongly reflects the scenogra-phy of integration discussed above. Nasik lies close to the location of the serious

communal riots which swept through Gujarat in 2002. The newspaper report isheadlined ‘Secularism in a Time of Strife’, the implicit proposition being thatblood donation, performed together by people from diverse origins, for unknownothers, helps to counter the divisions of communalism.

Soon after the Gujarat riots, a blood donation camp in Kolkata ‘was inaugur-ated by the Bengal Chief Minister . . . where 521 people donated their blood toregister their support for a country free of communal strife’. 32 Similarly in thecity of Allahabad, the Inquilabi Blood Donors Association is reported to stage


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blood donation camps which ‘lay particular stress on communal harmony andthe fact that blood recognizes no sectarian boundaries’. In popular discourse it is‘benighted’ Allahabad that epitomizes Uttar Pradesh state’s ‘half-closed society’.33

The Association’s camps, however, ‘soon acquired the status of a social movementwhere boys and girls mingled freely’.34

The anonymity characterizing voluntary blood donation is a further factorwhich contributes to the perception of it as an act promoting ‘national integra-tion’ and ‘communal harmony’. When compared with the system of replacementdonation, in which family members donate for their transfusion-requiring rela-tives, the anonymous system of voluntary donation can appear abstract and de-

personalized. Taussig (1998) argues that where there is facelessness, the face canstand for anyone. Following from this, faceless transfusion recipients can, from thestandpoint of donors, stand for any number of possible beneficiaries. Followingon from the differentially composed camp, then, anonymity provides a secondspace of enumeration, with voluntary donors frequently enumerating prospectiverecipients according to their possible caste or religious background. This kind of imaginative engagement amounts to an ‘active not knowing’ (Taussig, 1999: 7) onthe part of donors, and is in line with Smith’s (1963: 181) famous definition of the Indian state policy of secularism as ideally involving ‘active non-preference’towards the different communities over which it governs.35 From this angle, thenotion of ‘practical secularism’, formulated by the doctor cited above, is apt:donors cannot specify the community to which the recipients of their donationsbelong. They know their gift may literally be given to anyone; hence, donors’donations result from their enactment of active non-preference.

The point is emphasized in recruitment posters. An Indian Red Cross sloganreads: ‘Your blood will be used to treat patients without any distinction of caste,creed, or status.’ A Kolkata recruitment poster states: ‘Haru [a Hindu] donatedblood and saved the life of Harun [a Muslim]. Rohim [a Muslim] has donated toRam [a Hindu]. A little gift sometimes becomes much bigger (asamanya [rare,incomparable]).’ Syed Hussain, whom I met at a Youth Congress camp, told me:

I am a Muslim and I am donating blood. And that goes to the blood bank. And tomorrow, the

patient does not know whose blood it is they take, and nor do I know for whom I havedonated. It may be a Hindu; an upper-caste man may give to a lower caste; an upper-castewoman may receive the blood of a lower-caste person. This is for the integration of the people.

Enumeration has been productive in two ways here: organizers and participantsenumerate the distinct groups of people brought together in blood donationcamps; enumeration is also productive in voluntary acts of blood donation, inwhich donors are encouraged to imagine diverse recipients. I now describe the


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annual raksha bandhan blood donation event in Kolkata which provides a partic-ularly striking example of how blood donation camps can be the result of politi-cal acts of composition. In it, both modes of enumeration are clearly visible.

The raksha bandhan festival, notes Vanita (2002: 157–8):

. . . [is] widely celebrated in north India when sisters tie a thread (rakhi) on their brothers’wrists to affirm bonds of protection and nurturance. There is a long history of fictive kin rela-tions being established between women and men, even across Hindu–Muslim lines, throughthe tying of the rakhi.36

West Bengal’s Association of Voluntary Blood Donors (AVBD), a vanguard volun-

tary movement for the promotion of non-remunerated blood donation in the state,organizes a donation camp on this day annually in a central Kolkata museum,which draws inspiration from the festival’s association with fictive kinship andthe undoing or healing of religious divisions. The AVBD’s founder, DebabrataRay, described to me how his organization engages in the political composition of the camp: ‘We request organizations to attend that represent different languages,religions, and castes. For each state, also, there are different organizations. Weapproach the different caste groups beforehand, though at the camp itself we don’task their caste.’ Having closely observed the persons donating, and examined thenames on the donor questionnaire forms, Debabrata showed me an incompletelist he had made during the camp delineating the different constituencies he hadbrought together in its composition: ‘Total donors: 265. Women: 45. Muslim: 8(4 women). Christian: 33. Jain: 12. Sikh: 1. By language: Tamil: 4. Telegu: 3.Kannada: 2. Malayalam: 2. Hindi: 26. Oriya: 2. Assamese: 1. Bengali: rest. AmongHindus: all castes.’ The camp’s composition thus corresponded closely to thescenography of integration witnessed in National Integration Camps and in theBhilai steel plant’s recruitment policy, with the actively sought out representa-tives of different communities donating side by side.

In addition to the diverse constituencies of donor present at the camp, donorsI spoke with were acutely aware of the diverse constituencies of recipients towhom their donated blood would travel. In its publicity materials, the AVBD

refers to the festival’s association with sibling bonding, while using the univer-salistic property of anonymously giving for anyone to take the notion of bondagefurther – donors would enact active non-preference in creating bonds of protec-tion for any family member rather than for one family member in particular. Aswas noted above, rakhis are usually tied by sisters on their brothers for theirprotection; this is in return for the brother’s protective role as regards his sister.Donors at the raksha bandhan camp I attended told me they were expanding thebeneficiaries of the festival to include anybody’s sister or family member. Their


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donations were thus absolutely in keeping with the family-oriented nature of thefestival, but with ‘family’ understood in a far wider sense:

Today we are protecting other people’s sisters if they are in danger. That is the philosophy of this camp. When a little girl tied the rakhi on my hand, I felt I really am doing something tohelp someone’s little sister somewhere.

Another donor told me: ‘What we say here is, donate blood and that blood willbe used for protecting some sister or her family member ’ (my emphasis). Donatedblood complements or even supplants the rakhi as an agent of protection, withthe beneficiaries of protection ‘centrifuged’ to include all families, rather than

simply the ones to which specific donors belong. The ‘centrifuged’ festival thusmirrors the centrifuge of the form of donation, from family-replacement donationfor a relative to voluntary donation for anyone. Translated into the anonymousstructures of voluntary donation, the festival’s theme of protection is instantiatedthrough active not knowing and non-preference on the part of celebrants.

The AVBD’s operating of raksha bandhan in order to create indicative contin-uities between it and voluntary blood donation ideology draws attention to thesynergism that has come to exist between interlocking sets of widening move-ments in India: institutional, spiritual, familial and so on. The switch from a highlypersonalized family-replacement system to an anonymous, voluntary one appears,on the face if it, to eliminate the family from the domain of blood donation inIndia. What the case of the raksha bandhan festival demonstrates, however, isthat familial narratives are not restricted to the intense dramas of replacementdonation but, perhaps paradoxically, are also highly significant in the voluntarycontext, that is, in situations where donors are not donating for immediate familypurposes. The condition of this resurfacing of ‘the family’ in voluntary donationis its reconceptualization according to a broader template – this being in line withand in part a consequence of the ‘centrifuge’ of donor perspectives required bythe institutional transition to an anonymous voluntary blood donation system inwhich blood is donated for m/any.

The ‘Holding Together’ of Blood Banks and Transfusions

The camp is thus both a gathering point and the point from which dispersal tomany others originates. The ‘vein-to-vein chain’ – the processes through whichblood is extracted, transported, stored, tested, treated and transfused – consistsof a series of moments of gathering and dispersal. The next gathering point, afterthe camp, is the storage of donated blood in the blood bank. Now the Sathya SaiBaba hospital in Puttaparthi recently lodged a world record claim for possessing


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in its blood bank refrigerators the blood of the highest number of nationalities.As a former director of the blood bank informed me: ‘The blood bank, the entirehospital is a dream land. It is the only blood bank in the world where I can safelyclaim that pilgrims from more than 110 countries have voluntarily donated blood.’The blood bank thus holds together units of blood donated by the citizens of numerous different countries, creating a vision of international integration.37

Transfusions may in addition be viewed as gathering points. Transfusions areusually made up of several donated units; a single unit of blood is rarely trans-fused. A transfusion is therefore a centring of multiply sourced units, which are‘held together’ in a single patient’s body. Huyler (2000: 97), in his account of

working as a doctor in a United States hospital, vividly shows how transfusionsrender the patient a centre:

The ringing phone: ‘Blood bank.’

‘This is Dr Huyler. We need four more units of blood for Maria Gonzales.’

‘OK, we’re sending it up. But we’re running low. We’re going to have to send out for it soon.’

And so the blood started coming in by air from California and Colorado. It arrived cold, adeep icy red, the plastic bags stacked in cardboard boxes, with labels: Biohazard.

She became the centre of something. Airplanes converging, the whispering voices of consultants.Literature searches, abstracts of scientific papers inserted in the chart. The whir of machines,and she bled through it all.

As has been seen, diversely sourced gathering points are open to readings thatemphasize their integrative properties, and the transfusion is no exception. Cohen(2001) has described the 1977 film Amar Akbar Anthony in which three brothers,separated at birth, have been brought up as Hindu, Muslim and Christian respec-tively. A woman, unbeknownst to them their mother, requires a transfusion:

In the transfusion scene, three intravenous lines connect the men to the woman, Bharati, whosename [‘Indian’] and body figure the nation. The camera pans showing the three young trans-fusers in turn with a temple, mosque or church respectively as backdrop. (2001: 15)

India herself is the centre into which its constituent religious populations deliver

themselves in an image of transfusion as national integration.As Cohen (2001) points out, however, that the transfused woman is Hinduensures that ‘integration’ takes place under a Hindu sign, thus suggesting a verticalinterpretation of national integration, with Hinduism the overarching nationalschema into which ‘minorities’ must obligingly position themselves. This, of course, can be read as a departure from the Nehruvian insistence on the equalstatus of all religions, and serves as a reminder that ‘national integration’ is acontested category, the egalitarian content of which cannot be taken for granted(McKean, 1996; Sheth, 1996).38


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There is a further matter which makes the transfusion image ambiguous froma Nehruvian standpoint. As was mentioned above, the brothers were separatedat birth – by birth, that is, they were Hindu, before being brought up separatelyas Hindu, Christian and Muslim. There is a sense therefore in which the assemblyof ‘diversely’ sourced blood in the patient-centre is in fact a gathering of the same.This becomes clearer in the light of recent comments made by Hindu nationalistleaders. The leader of the RSS (Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, ‘Association of National Volunteers’; a highly disciplined Hindu nationalist organization treatedas a moral authority by other Hindutva groups), K.S. Sudarshan, recently declaredthat: ‘The blood flowing in the veins of Indian Muslims is the same as Lord Rama

and Krishna . . . in a true sense, both Lord Rama and Krishna are ancestors of Indian Muslims.’ And, recalling Vanaik’s (1997: 309) comment that the rhetori-cal ‘respect’ offered by Hindu nationalist leaders to India’s Muslims exists ‘notbecause they are Muslims and believe in Islam but because, in a more funda-mental sense, they are not Muslims!’, the former BJP President Banguru Laxmanhas similarly asserted that ‘Muslims are the flesh of our flesh and the blood of our blood but they never got their rightful share in the nation’s development norhave they been able to join the national mainstream to play their due role innation-building’, the implication being that if they were not of the same bloodthen such privileges might not follow.39

From this perspective, the transfusion image provides an instance of a gatheringof the same: the Christian and the Muslim may have ‘converted’ from Hinduism,but their blood is still Hindu – what is being gathered together is Hindu blood.I do not, however, wish to overstate its departure from the Nehruvian model;after all, it has been argued, notably by Benei (2006), that Nehru’s integrativemessage itself operated ‘under a Hindu sign’. And yet the image does representa departure from the examples of the Nehruvian nationalist vision presented inthis article, which engage in active traversals and enumerations of diversity inorder to make visible its constituents and acknowledge their presence within thecontaining nation. The transfusion image is more ambiguous than this, withgatherings of the same operating not far beneath the more overt narrative of a

holding together of difference. The example is helpful in drawing attention tosome of the uneasy coexistences that exist between vertical and horizontal modelsof integration.

The ‘Holding Together’ of Undivided Units

An additional key ‘holding together’ – which further demonstrates the repli-cability of integrative images at different scales – resides in the unit of donatedblood itself. As was noted above, blood component therapy entails the separation


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of donated blood into its constituent components in order that several peoplemay be treated from one donated unit (see Copeman, 2005, 2006). The develop-ment of this technology in the 1950s revealed that blood, instead of being a single,self-similar substance, is a holding together of red cells, platelets and plasma – alluseful in different ways for diverse types of treatment. Plasma can be further sub-divided through a procedure called fractionation. Bayer and Feldman (1999: 8)assert that: ‘As blood plasma is increasingly subject to transformation by pharma-ceutical firms, it is difficult to sustain the symbolic attachments evoked by wholeblood.’ Waldby and Mitchell (2006: 43–4), too, state unequivocally that tech-niques of blood-splitting dilute the ontological and civic value of donated blood.

My experience, however, suggests otherwise; indeed, I show now why separatedblood may be particularly well-suited to evoking images of a ‘whole’ and inte-grated nation. The significant point here is that as a ‘heterogeneous collective’(Callon, 1998: 30) of different sorts of cells, the single unit of blood, prior to itsseparation, can be and is understood by donors as a holding together of diver-sity and thus as a kind of microcosm of ‘national integration’.

Some of the donors I spoke with at camps knew about the division proceduresand some did not. However, when I asked both sets of donor what they thoughtabout the separation of their donated blood, a recurring motif – especiallyamongst followers of gurus with universalizing orientations like Sathya Sai Babaor Baba Hardev Singh, the guru presiding over the Sant Nirankari devotionalorder, and among avowed ‘secularists’, followers of Nehru’s ‘universalist versionof nationalism’ (Jaffrelot, 1996: 83) – was the hope that their singularly donatedunit would be transfused into three persons from three different ‘communities’.

A woman I met at a camp staged by an insurance company in New Delhi, wellaware of and enthused by the idea of component therapy, told me: ‘There is nodiscrimination, it is non-attachment. I am hopeful my blood will go to threedifferent castes ( jatis).’ A Hindu devotee of Sathya Sai Baba, whom I met at adonation camp organized by devotees in Delhi, declared that he hoped his onedonated unit would be split and transfused into a Christian, a Muslim and a Sikhrespectively, in order to show that all people and religions are one. He then

pointed to Sai Baba’s Sarvadharma symbol, which is assembled of emblems fromall the major world religions. The symbol, like the camp, the blood bank, thetransfusion and the unit of blood prior to its division, holds together signs of diverse origins, providing an arresting image of integration. One medic’s notionof ‘universal plasma’ was discussed above. In this case also, the technology of blood component therapy becomes a technology for the imagining of Indiansocial diversity. While component therapy is evidently an act of technical decom-position rather than composition, what it strikingly demonstrates is that the unit,


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prior to the separation procedure, is a gathered entity and thus, like the idealizednation, a holding together of the many in the one. In imagining their singularlyoffered donations as forming the transfusions of several persons belonging todifferent castes or religions, donors see donation as an integrative action. The onegift’s route to m/any serves to reveal m/any’s oneness, with the undivided unit,by virtue of the diverse destinations to which, in its divided form, it travels, beingconstrued as India herself, a gathering up and holding together – all of India, asit were, in a unit of blood. The discussion here of undivided blood units prior totheir separation and that above of the raksha bandhan camp has demonstratedthe power of anonymity in creating a space for prospective enumeration on the

part of donors of their gifts’ possible recipients. This anonymity-enabled enumer-ation makes blood donation into an ‘extensional field’ (Konrad, 2005: 49) inwhich, to recall the Times of India exam paper, it is the ‘many segments of thepeople’ constituting the nation that are extended across.

Anderson (1991: 90) famously highlighted the important place of anonymityin national imaginaries, noting that: ‘[n]o more arresting emblems of the modernculture of nationalism exist than the cenotaphs and tombs of Unknown Soldiers. . . void as these tombs are of identifiable mortal remains or immortal souls, theyare nonetheless saturated with ghostly national imaginings’. Similarly unidentifi-able, transfusion recipients are a medicalized variant of the ‘unknown soldier’,invisible loci of ghostly national imaginings. Adorning the office desk of a Delhiblood bank director is a handmade poster, designed by the child of an employee,depicting a cheque which reads: ‘Pay: Unknown Soldier. Amount: one life’. It isthe impossibility of knowing who recipients will be which means they can beimagined as being anyone at all, and this article has shown that anonymity isoften the occasion for imaginative traversals of India’s ‘many segments’. Konrad(2005) employs the term ‘transilient’ in an attempt to conceptualize oblique formsof relationality – in particular anonymized and numerically ambiguous relationsof multiplicity and extension among ova donors and recipients in Britain. Theanonymity of blood donation, as the condition of possibility of donors’ pros-pective traversal of the nation’s ‘many segments’, forms the basis of what can be

termed a ‘national transilience’: the enactment of thread-like imaginative exten-sions across diverse plurality as the folding of different constituencies into a singlesocial field.

Mauss (1990) famously saw reciprocal gifts as key instruments in the insti-tuting and sustaining of enduring social relations and solidarity. Anonymousand non-reciprocal, voluntary blood donation appears precisely contrary to theMaussian ideal. And yet, this article has explored an abundance of integrativenarratives in which anonymity not only fails to thwart but actively facilitates


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claim, such doctors also seek to protect voluntary blood donation from thecounter-Nehruvian suggestion that jobs be reserved for donors. The ideology of voluntary blood donation is thus contested terrain and, as these counter-currentsdemonstrate, Nehruvian thinking by no means dominates the field. But neithercan it be dismissed as dead and buried, which has been a tendency in many recentwritings on secularism and the rise of Hindu nationalism in contemporary India.This article has explored the continuing conceptual power and prevalence of theNehruvian ideology of national integration, identified a particular ‘scenography’according to which images of integration are staged, and focused on the moralsignificance of anonymity in making non-exceptional difference-traversing gifts.

It has also suggested that it is not merely from the physical connectivity of blooddonation that the ideology of national integration is made physically manifestand potent, but through a powerful combination of anonymity as an imagina-tive canvas and a series of moments of gathering – of persons, blood units andseparable cells – which together form the ‘vein-to-vein chain’.

The article has also focused attention on the important place of enumerationas a component of the aforementioned scenography. What Kapila (2008) hasshown in a discussion of how the Gaddi pastoral group of Himachal Pradeshwent about securing ‘Scheduled Tribe’ status is how the ‘unifying . . . moder-nizing nationalist discourse’ and ‘separating technologies of governmentality’ gohand in hand; for ‘in its pursuit of unity, the Indian state has been forced into therecognition of ever more evolved forms of cultural difference’ (2008: 129). Thepoint is made in reference to the politics of recognition and redistribution, but ithas wider implications. Separation and unification frequently proceed together inother contexts too, for separation produces the entities to be unified (cohesivelycontained). This article has argued that the analytical implications of enumerationare not exhausted by existing emphases on fixity and fissiparity. As a necessarycondition of congregative thought, enumeration contains other possibilities too.The examples presented in this article indicate that the scenography of inte-gration relies on separate and separable identities for the promissory visions of national holding together it instantiates.

Such a scenography is well suited to the gathering procedures of blood dona-tion’s vein-to-vein chain, which are capable of reproducing it at a variety of scales.The cohesive nation can be encapsulated, via this scenography, in a geographicterritory, a camp, a single unit of blood, a transfusion and so on. The existenceof this scalar framework – the fact that different parties should wish to replicatethe scenography of integration on different planes – suggests that at a time whenthe Nehruvian worldview is supposedly under threat in all sorts of domains of Indian life, Nehruvian thought continues to possess a powerful and creativepresence in the Indian blood donation milieu. Blood procurement technologies


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of gathering and disbursal provide instantiations of national integration in vivo,its recreation and reassertion demonstrating that it is a project, rather than a givendatum, which continues as an ongoing labour in new and unexpected contexts.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Joseph Alter, Susan Bayly, Lawrence Cohen, James Laidlaw, Alice Street andDenis Vidal for comments on the text and the stimulus of their work. I am grateful to the UnitedKingdom Economic and Social Research Council for financial assistance.

Notes1. Such a depiction of blood donation as a site of condensation of a host of disparate actors, ideas,

priorities and activities is congruent with Reddy’s (2007: 460) recent formulation of the successivestages of the bioethical encounter, whose ‘mixed’ character – with its ‘consonance . . . controversy . . .gifts, substances, information, and commodities’ – is ensured by its enfolding of ‘disparate worldviewsin a single transactional chain’.

2. The argument draws on data originating from fieldwork conducted in a broad spectrum of blood donation contexts in north India, principally in Delhi, between 2003 and 2005.

3. Edwards and Osborne (2005) use the term in relation to suicide, and its ‘staging’ in variouscontexts.

4. The notion of political composition I take from Mosse (2004: 647), who, drawing on Latour(2000), notes that ‘actors in development are constantly engaged in creating order and unity throughpolitical acts of composition’.

5. Blood donation camps are staged principally in educational, political, religious and businesssettings.6. Part of this sentence paraphrases Strathern (2006: 27).7. Anonymity is a key feature of voluntary systems of corporeal donation. The normative practice

of not telling the recipient about the donor or the donor about the recipient is a means of avoidingindebtedness (Fox and Swazey, 1992: 37).

8. Most medical opinion is now strongly opposed to both paid and replacement donation. Payingdonors is said to provide an incentive to conceal disqualifying factors such as HIV/AIDS (Brooks,2004: 282). Replacement donation is thought to pressurize patients’ relatives unduly, pushing many toseek paid donors to donate in their stead, and threatening those who cannot arrange for this kind of donation with denial of life-saving treatment.

9. I do not wish to imply that there was no such thing as voluntary blood donation in India priorto the recent legislative changes; rather that the legislation required its active fostering while at thesame time demanding an end to those other forms of donation with which it had hitherto coexisted

in a mixed system of procurement.10. The Red Cross makes no charge for the units of blood it provides to patients in government

hospitals, though it does tend to require replacement donations from patients’ relatives. The Rotaryblood bank charges Rs 900 per unit (roughly $23), which is unaffordable to many, though it claims togive blood away for free to the economically disadvantaged.

11. Even as moves are afoot to secure ‘well-off blood’, a countervailing trend is gathering pacewhich sees the underprivileged adherents of a range of devotional orders provide an increasingproportion of voluntarily donated blood (see Copeman, 2009).

12. See Cohen (2001: 21) on transformations in Indian healthcare consequent upon economic liber-alization.


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13. However, while government efforts are indeed afoot in China to foster a voluntary system of blood donation, it should also be noted that economic liberalization is reported to have bolstered themarket in human blood products, with blood being sold in particular by agricultural producers inorder to provide them with the purchasing power needed to enter the heady world of consumptionfrom which they had earlier been barred (see Anagnost, 2006; Shao, 2006: 557).

14. As Street (this issue) points out, anonymous voluntary blood donation lends itself to imagin-ings of community and nation in ways that paid and replacement donation cannot.

15. While replacement donations given by relatives are rarely actually transfused into their sickfamily members, such donations are nevertheless in essence given ‘for’ them in order to facilitate theirtreatment.

16. Though it should be emphasized that abstract giving to ‘anyone’ is frequently facilitated byspecific symbolic broker figures such as gurus or politicians (see Copeman, 2004, 2005, 2008; Reddy,2007). See Street, this issue; Copeman, this issue [Introduction]).

17. I am influenced here by Konrad’s (2005) powerful critique of anthropological characterizationsof anonymity which discount the imaginative possibilities of ‘not-knowing’.

18. See Brass (1990: chs 5–7) and Husain (1996) on political moves to foster ‘national integration’in post-Independence India.

19. An irony here is the pivotal role Indira Gandhi played in undoing the efforts of her father inpromoting national integration. In the years preceding the so-called Emergency of 1975–7, theCongress’s populist goals ‘had come to be expressed in terms which covertly signaled the importanceof jati and varna classifications to anyone who could be thought of as wronged or deprived’ (Bayly,1999: 285; see also Khilnani, 1997: ch. 1). This led to sometimes violent competition between differentcaste groups in order to secure the state windfalls promised by Indira Gandhi.

20. See URL (consulted February 2008): http://learning.indiatimes.com/test_papers/papers/social_%20science/1997/set1a9_a15.htm

21. Hindutva, or Hindu nationalism, is ‘a label for the politics of exclusive Hindu identity, as exem-

plified by the BJP, VHP, RSS, and Shiv Sena’ (Heehs, 1998: 116).22. Though I contrast the Nehruvian and Hindutva variants of national integration, Benei (2006)argues that Nehru’s conceptualization of the nation was unwittingly ‘Hindu’. While Benei may becorrect that the two variants represent the different extremes of a continuum, I maintain that thereremain important qualitative differences between them.

23. See URL (consulted February 2008): http://learning.indiatimes.com/test_papers/papers/social_%20science/1997/set1a9_a15.htm

24. See URL (consulted February 2008): http://yas.nic.in/yasroot/schemes/integration/integra-tion.htm

25. The Hindu, 3 December 2005.26. I borrow ‘holding together’ from Hirsch (1995), who uses it in relation to the capacity of ritual

among the Fuyuge of the Papuan highlands to hold together a variety of persons and things.27. A devotional order in the sant tradition, the Dera Sacha Sauda is not exclusively Hindu or Sikh

but venerates the teachings of sants who have been important and influential in each religion. See

Copeman (2009) for a fuller description.28. For example: Navan Jamana, 12 October 2004.29. World Blood Donor Day was begun in 2004 for the global promotion of voluntary blood

donation, and is promoted by the Red Cross and WHO.30. The kumbh mela is a massive Hindu convocation which takes place four times in every 12

years. Rotating between Prayag, Haridwar, Ujjain and Nasik, these are the locations where, in thevedic period, four drops of amrita (the nectar of immortality) are said to have fallen to the groundduring a battle between gods and demons for its possession. Attended by millions, includingthousands of sadhus, its centrepiece is a ritual bathing at the banks of the rivers in each location.

31. Times of India, 28 July 2003.


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32. Ganashakti Newsmagazine, 18 March 2002.33. The reputation of Uttar Pradesh state, along with that of Bihar, is blighted by its poor record

on women’s rights, communal tensions and criminal activity.34. Outlook, 22 October 2001.35. Though the state has indeed subjected the practices of different religious communities to regu-

lation, it is supposed to do so in a balanced and equal manner (Hansen, 1999: 53). High-profile debatessurround the question of whether this ideology is adequately put into practice.

36. See Freed and Freed (1998: 250–6) for a colourful description of raksha bandhan as celebratedin a north Indian village.

37. The blood bank’s location at a pilgrimage centre creates a parallel with the Dera Sacha Saudacamps, which are also points at which extractable pilgrims converge. The kumbh mela camp providesanother example of pilgrims as a medical resource.

38. If Benei’s (2006) argument were to be accepted, however, such a vertical interpretation of

national integration would represent less a divergence from the Nehruvian model than its truest face.39. The Week, 10 September 2000.40. While it could be argued that reservations form part of a Nehruvian concern with social justice

– and therefore that my distinction between Nehruvian thought and reservations is illegitimate –Nehru himself saw only an extremely limited application for reservation schemes, with caste ‘slatedto wither away through a process of modernization’ (Rao, 2003).

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Jacob Copeman is a Research Fellow at Jesus College, Cambridge, and a member of the CambridgeUniversity Department of Social Anthropology. His recent book Veins of Devotion: Blood Donationand Religious Experience in North India (Rutgers University Press, 2009) explores remarkable collab-orations between guru-led devotional movements and public health campaigns to promote blooddonation in northern India. He has also written articles on cadaver donation, dissection and medicaltechnology in contemporary India. His current research concerns include eye donation, the mediationof Tantra, and pan-Indian campaigns to eradicate ‘superstition’. [email: [email protected]]


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Gathering Points: Blood Donation and the Scenography of National Integration in India

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