Slow Violence and the Gas Peedit in Neoliberal India

This article analyzes the ways in which slow violence and neoliberalism intertwine in the production of social and environmental destruction, evident in the lingering devastation from the 1984 Union Carbide catastrophe in Bhopal, India. Children are born with congenital abnormalities; women are plagued with reproductive health problems; and dangerous chemicals left in the abandoned factory continue to contaminate soil and groundwater. Yet Bhopal is remembered almost exclusively for the spectacle of its immediate aftermath. Drawing on 60 interviews with Bhopal victims and activists, field observations, archives, and official and independent reports, this paper examines how the neoliberal turn in Indian governance plays a role in the creation of slow violence. The paper advances our understanding of socioenvironmental destruction by tying slow violence to a temporal change in countries' governance in the Global South. The paper underscores the significance of considering political economic dynamics in the perpetration of slow violence. It also emphasizes how the neoliberal turn, now anchored in right-wing Hindutva politics in India, further constrains the possibilities for counter-measures that would address slow violence. The paper offers significant implications for analyzing the political economy of socioenvironmental and health disparities in the wake of corporate malfeasance.

The poetics and politics of ‘progress’ in neoliberal India: The state and its margins in Shanghai (2012)

The contemporary Indian state is exemplified by contradictions. Its workings are marked by a simultaneous retreat and deepening of state power under neoliberalism as well as burgeoning governmentalities that both produce and police political dissent. Such framings of the state problematize received political wisdom on the relations between centre and margin, state and government, citizen and subject. Anthropological approaches to the state map out its complex organizational logics, which are further embedded in the exercise of power and violence. Drawing on such approaches, this article examines the 2012 Indian film Shanghai, directed by Dibakar Banerjee. Based on Greek author Vassilis Vassilikos’ 1966 novel Z, Shanghai represents the contemporary neoliberal Indian state’s workings in the fictitious periurban town of Bharatnagar, slated to become a world-class Special Economic Zone. However, when a left-wing activist opposing land acquisition is fatally injured in an ‘accident’, a state bureaucrat’s investigation unravels how the onward march of pragati (‘progress’) is undergirded by violence. Taking Shanghai as an example of ‘realist fiction’, I examine both representations and realities of the neoliberal Indian state using a thick and nuanced reading of the film’s narrative, cinematic details, context and characters, situating them in anthropological discussions on the state and its margins in contemporary India.

Bollywood studies at 2020

Review of: Dark Fear, Eerie Cities: New Hindi Cinema In Neoliberal India, Sarunas Paunksnis (2019) New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 172 pp., ISBN 978-0-19949-318-0, h/bk, $30 Unruly Cinema: History, Politics, and Bollywood, Rini Bhattacharya Mehta (2020) Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 233 pp., ISBN 978-0-25208-499-7, p/bk, $25

Power, privilege and paradox: Understanding Ranveer Singh’s sartorial fame and the (un)making of the new millennial masculinity in contemporary Indian society

Bollywood film star Ranveer Singh’s fashion choices are often defined as eccentric, outlandish and even androgynous, in particular, his much-talked-about public appearances in bright floral pantsuits, or kohl-lined eyes and man-skirts are discussed in popular media as subverting gender norms and challenging gender binaries. Commenting on the shift in representation of contemporary Bollywood’s male protagonist, film scholars have argued that Singh embodies ‘metrosexual masculinity’ in neoliberal India and that his on- and off-screen persona involves deliberate scripting of a ‘feminist’ and ‘less patriarchally structured masculinity’. Testing the extent of the assertions mentioned above, I examine Singh’s media persona as a site of cultural production and a form of social reproduction. I use a feminist theoretical framework, and gender studies debates to critique Singh’s negotiations with gender and sexuality in his media images across – film, advertisement and social media. I argue that the millennial star as a fashion icon is not only far from offering a progressive model of millennial masculinity, but is also working towards normalizing Hindu gender ideologies that have long sanctioned power to men and subjugated women in Indian society. Focusing on the role played by the corporatized androcentric media industry, I argue that ‘feminist’ posturing of the star appropriates and suppresses other forms of marginal identities. Singh’s media persona thus works to maintain the status quo as far as gender, class and caste identities are concerned, and becomes a vehicle of the nationalist ideology under the present right-wing leader, Narendra Modi.

Pakodas, jugad and the vernacular fetish: Youth subcultures in late neoliberal India

My article talks about the vernacular in terms of a fantasy relation, drawing on Lauren Berlant’s understanding of love/desire as a fantasy that is always staged through a concrete setting, ‘the place where the subject encounters herself already negotiating the social’. This site of fantasy is moreover the one triggered by the trauma of natal separation. This in-between reality of the vernacular as a lost memory as well as a fantasy of the real makes it an ideal fetish figure for our times. I explain the fetish for the concrete in the context of a post-hegemonic, post-ideological capitalist state that has abandoned its role of catering for the subsistence needs of food, clothing and shelter of its most marginalized people as well as those who are unemployed. The compensatory succour that used to be obtained from the reproductive work of women’s domestic labour is also in crisis, given the commoditization of their care work. My article then looks at the gendered nature of the youth voices and subcultures filling this lack of systematic all-round care through the language of jugad. The valorization of jugad or the positing of concrete solutions to abstract problems actually gives us a lesson in the meaning of abstract labour, as something not merely confined to the realm of labour but to social forms (or use-values) constituted beyond the ambit of the market and judicial structures.