As urban boundaries stretch out into agro-pastoral hinterlands, the ecologies of land and water are profoundly altered in diverse and inequitable ways. Drawing on over a decade of ethnographic fieldwork in and around India’s Millennial City – Gurgaon, this presentation examines the shifting ecologies of land, caste, and cattle. It analyzes how Gujjar smallholders, who until recently were agro-pastoralists, navigate the massive overhauling of their lives and livelihoods. While the entangled ecologies of agriculture, ponds, forests, and pastures are rapidly erased or obscured, the calculations of caste and class-based authority, property, agrarian pride, and status continue to materially and affectively tether smallholders to their villages, cattle, and milk economies. Amid these transformations, Gujjar smallholders slowly, albeit unevenly, enter the business of land and property, illustrating how new capitalist relations are produced, alongside ‘new’ natures such as ‘Zoo safaris’ and ‘Oxy-van.’ These assemblages of urban social-natures awkwardly articulate agrarian and urban along the social registers of caste, class, brotherhood, and the rising tide of Hindu nationalism.
This event will run at 9 – 10 AM EST and 6.30 – 7.30 PM IST
About the speaker
Shubhra Gururani is the Director of York Centre for Asian Research (YCAR) and Associate Professor of Anthropology at York University. She has formerly served as the Chair and Undergraduate Program Director of the Department of Anthropology, the Associate Director of York Center for Asian Research, Interim Director of the CITY Institute, and the Coordinator of the South Asian Studies Program.
Her areas of research and teaching lie at the intersection of critical political ecologies, space and place, urban transformation, especially in the Global South, agrarian change, postcolonial development, and histories of science and nature. Her earlier research was based on ethnographic fieldwork in the Indian Himalayas, namely Uttarakhand, and examined how long and complex histories of scientific forestry and colonialism produced the highly gendered landscape of labour, access, and knowledge. Her current research focuses on the processes and politics of agrarian-urban changes in the peripheries of metropolitan centers in India. She is currently working on my book manuscript on the making of India’s Millennial City, Gurgaon.
*The link to the event will be sent out 24 hours prior
