Deepak Mehta is Professor of Sociology at Ashoka University. He is a Ph.D from Delhi University. He has taught at the Delhi School of Economics, Department of Sociology at Delhi University and at Shiv Nadar University. He is the author of Work, Ritual, Biography: A Muslim Community in North India (OUP, 1997) and co-author of Living With Violence: An Anthropology of Events and Everyday Life (Routledge, 2007). His current research interests centre around the anthropology of material culture in its relationship to language and the body, and of law and violence.