[4] Das has received multiple international awards including the Ander Retzius Gold Medal, delivered the prestigious Lewis Henry Morgan Lecture and was named a foreign honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Veena Das's most recent book is Life and Words: Violence and the Descent into the Ordinary (California University Press, 2006).
One of the chapters in the book deals with the state of abducted women in the post-independence time period and has been the interest of various legal historians.
Life and Words is heavily influenced by Wittgenstein and Stanley Cavell, but it also deals with particular moments in history such as the Partition of India and the assassination of Indira Gandhi in 1984.
She received the Anders Retzius Gold Medal from the Swedish Society for Anthropology and Geography in 1995,[7] and an honorary doctorate from the University of Chicago in 2000.