Politics

Political movements and claims to the state form the central linchpin of my research. In the Indian context, I have done close empirical work with the women-led Shaheen Bagh protests around India’s urban centres, anti-debt movements in East India and the recent pan-India farmers’ protests that mobilized the largest number of people for a cause in global history. My work cuts across traditional ascriptions of ‘state’ and ‘society’ and studies diverse political relationships of groups making claims to and in the name of the state. My approach is bring ‘structuralist’ and ‘post-structuralist’ modes of state power in a dialectical tension with each other and observe how power operates, punctuates and is appropriated by disparate groups. The state remains central in postcolonial contexts such as of India despite it's ‘failures’ and discontents. The state portends a centralized mode of power but is articulated, practiced and interpreted in diverse ways across scales of analysis.

I capture my observations on the field through visual media, soundscapes and immersive ethnography of crowds, collectives and political mobilizations. I study how these movements correspond with financial flows and resist and reshape investors’ interests and financial requirements of repayment, interest rates and ever-increasing profits.