Profane Relations: The Irony of Offensive Jokes in India

On the shopfloor of an Indian automobile plant, a multi-ethnic workforce exchanges potentially offensive ethnic jokes with one another while remaining largely silent on actual incidences of communal violence. This paper shows how silence and profane humour are important aspects of an inter-ethnic sociality in the workplace, which distances itself from the retaliatory logics of communal violence. Speaking in the indirect register of irony, I argue that jokes about one another's religion and ethnicity are a means by which cultural intimates articulate anti-communal perspectives on public life. I suggest that profanity is a style of interaction that relates to an anti-communal sociality which distances itself from the politics of sanctity.