It is an honour to contribute to this volume that takes stock of knowledge formations within and beyond academic disciplines in India at this juncture—roughly seven and a half decades or so into our postcolonial journey as a sovereign, democratic republic. One of the tasks of such formations of thought, whether in myth, ritual, or in non-mythic forms, is to teach us how to relate to the past. I write this chapter, inspired by postcolonial anthropology and popular religion, not as a historian but as an anthropologist and as a citizen, a term that can still hopefully endure based on sentiments not necessarily nameable as nationalism. How do we learn to count and recount what lay prior to India at 75, and to sense forces, including historically blurry forces, that remain active or reactive even today? If that sounds too obscure, let me pose this instead as a founding question that any nation may face or evade: is India a settler colony like Israel, the United States, Australia, or Canada? And if not, then what were the forms of conflict and cohabitation between first and later settlers? Such questions could be diversely and combatively answered, even today, depending on the regional vantage point from which it is asked.

Rather than statist or separatist answers, in this chapter I receive forms of unschooled knowledge from two kinds of ancestral spirits—first, a horsebound deity found in byway shrines across South (and East) Asia, said to police untimely dead ancestral spirits, who I argue offers an insight into South Asian pasts that reorient terms like caste and tribe, in ways different from state and national curricular definitions.