Prof. Dr. Manisha Sethi

Sethi is a sociologist by training who works at the intersection of religion and law, with a special focus on Jains in contemporary times. Her other research interest is sociology of law, in particular, anti-terror law, and how it creates a classification between authentic and inauthentic nationals. She received her Ph.D. in sociology for her work on female jain ascetics from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. She has taught previously at Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi and NALSAR University of Law, Hyderabad.  Sethi helps edit Biblio, India’s preeminent book review magazine. 

Intention, Agency and the Good Death: Religious and Legal Debates in India

At the junction of religion and law, the project attempts to examine how medicalisation of death and the hegemony of modern legal rationality contend with religio-cultural notions of good death in India. It does this by attending to two types of legal engagements with voluntary death. Firstly, the public and legal controversies surrounding religiously sanctioned, voluntary fasting to death (sallekhana) among the Jain community in India, and, secondly, the judicial outcomes relating to right to die for those with terminal illnesses (passive euthanasia, assisted suicide etc). 

These two streams of judicial and public commentaries have not been brought into conversation with each other before. I argue that a comparative exercise will yield the intersections between two seemingly disparate debates, and has wider theoretical implications for understanding notions of volition, agency, personhood, and religious belief in non-western contexts. 

• Embodying the Mahavratas: Female renouncers among the Jains”, in Gayatri Sinha (ed.) The Body of the Ascetic, Delhi: Delhi Art Gallery, 2025. 
• “Border Crossings between the Legal and the Social: On the interface of Law, Sociology and Anthropology in India”, in Ratheesh Kumar and P. Babu Ramesh (eds.) Practicing Interdisciplinarity: Convergences and Contestations. Delhi: Routledge India, 2024.
• “From the Bigoted Julaha to the Terrorist: Stigma and Identity in Azamgarh”, in Fazal, Jodhka and Vaid (eds.) Marginalities and Mobilities among India’s Muslims. UK and India: Routledge, 2023. 
• Jainism in Danger? Temple Entry and the Rhetoric of Religion and Reform in post colonial India”, Modern Asian Studies, 55:5, 2021, 1718-1754, doi.org/10.1017/ S0026749X20000402. 
• (Editor) Communities and Courts: Religion and Law in Modern India. UK: Routledge, 2022.
• ‘Ritual Death in a Secular State: The practice of Sallekhana”, South Asian History and Culture, 10:2, 136-151, DOI: 10.1080/19472498.2019.1609261 10.