Women’s hostels – or university residence halls – in Chennai are full of ghosts who cry in the corner, play pranks on students, and occasionally tell scandalous stories that contradict and render unfamiliar the official histories of the buildings they inhabit. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in women’s colleges in Chennai, my talk will look at the ghostly stories that animate everyday life in a women’s hostel. Examining them not as alternative or subaltern histories waiting to be recovered, I instead ask what these encounters might tell us about young womanhood as a site of...
This talk explores the lives, thought-worlds, and struggles of migrant workers working in a metal polishing export factory in the Okhla Industrial Area of Delhi. The workers of the Okhla factory, I argue, become entangled in activities which give rise to work intensifications, bodily hazards, surface-level respect relations, and competitive envy. According to workers’ implicit political and cosmological visions, these activities can be seen to arise from an entangling, dynamic interplay of souls and the Kalyug (the present, ‘decivilizing’ epoch in Hindu cosmology), in...
This talk provides an account of the everyday relationship of farmers with transnational and domestic agribusiness capital, by focusing on the figure of the village-level petty retailer of chemical inputs. Retailers are those who provision farmers with seeds, fertilizers, pesticides, and other chemicals, manufactured by companies like Monsanto and Syngenta. They thus constitute the bottom-most rung of the agribusiness supply chain. The talk traces the rise of such village-level retailers in western Maharashtra, India, since the 1990s, and finds that Maratha (a dominant land-holding caste)...
While India’s South possesses rich and multi-lingual elite literary traditions spanning over two thousand years, contemporary writing in South India has developed vibrant sites of subversion and transgression of this heritage, linguistically, aesthetically, thematically and politically. This paper engages and historicizes these sites of transgressive innovation by taking as a starting point the work of contemporary female poets writing in Malayalam and Tamil.
My readings of this new body of writing from the past decade attend to its wider location within South Indian literary and...
