Papers by Durba Chattaraj
Substack, 2024
After spending much of the last decade in India building a truly promising Liberal Arts Universit... more After spending much of the last decade in India building a truly promising Liberal Arts University under very difficult political circumstances, and witnessing the rewards that this type of learning reaps everyday — for students in both the sciences and the humanities — it is extremely bizarre to witness the push, from many directions, in the United States away from the Liberal-Arts towards a narrow-STEM- focused-form of learning, purportedly to prepare young people for future job markets.
For in India, the push has been in the opposite direction, towards the Liberal Arts, and towards the expansion of the humanities and Social Sciences. Across the board most educators in in the country agree that sixty years of STEM-focused education has not sufficiently prepared Indian students for an increasingly dynamic job market, or for the many challenges of citizenship in an era of social media, AI, and fake news. So India is creating new Liberal Arts Universities at breakneck speed to make up for this lag, even as its previously Technology-focused institutes, the IITs (Indian Institutes of Technology), have become vastly expanded universities with full-scale humanities and social science faculties. Similar moves are happening in universities across the Global South — in both private institutions and state.
Is this a case of places in the Global South importing a dead technology — that of the Liberal Arts University — at a lag, like their embrace of big hair bands in the 1990s — or is it a moment for the US to look, with genuine concern, at what it is losing when it cuts so deep?
New Perspectives on India and Turkey, 2018
Teaching Anthropology, 2020
In an increasingly interconnected world, learning how to think anthropologically — learning how t... more In an increasingly interconnected world, learning how to think anthropologically — learning how to think with difference — should be an essential part of the process of higher education. Yet many students may never take an anthropology course during their undergraduate career. In such a milieu, it is important for anthropologists to both teach and actively participate in the curriculum design of the first-year writing seminars that are part of the core curriculum of many universities and colleges globally. While first-year writing programs predominate in the United States and the United Kingdom, they are growing internationally as well, particularly in liberal arts institutions. In this article I argue that anthropologists should teach first-year writing seminars at their educational institutions for three reasons: first, anthropology as a discipline is ecumenical about evidence; thus it introduces students to a wide range of evidentiary practices early on. This broad-based understa...
Anthropology and Humanism
Teaching Anthropology , 2020
In an increasingly interconnected world, learning how to think anthropologically-learning how to ... more In an increasingly interconnected world, learning how to think anthropologically-learning how to think with difference-should be an essential part of the process of higher education. Yet many students may never take a single anthropology course during their undergraduate career. In such a milieu, it is important for anthropologists to both teach and actively participate in the curriculum design of the first-year writing seminars that are part of the core curriculum of many universities and colleges globally. While first-year writing programs predominate in the United States and the United Kingdom, they are growing internationally as well, particularly in liberal arts institutions. In this article, I argue that anthropologists should teach first-year writing seminars at their educational institutions for three reasons: first, anthropology as a discipline is ecumenical about evidence; thus, it introduces students to a wide range of evidentiary practices early on. This broad-based understanding of evidence facilitates transfer across disciplines. Second, encountering anthropology in a writing seminar attracts students towards pursuing majors, minors and elective classes in the discipline. Finally, through the discipline's core methodology of participant observation, lived experience, rather than a synthesis of pre-existing texts, is the core source from which arguments and conclusions about the social world are derived. In an increasingly unequal world where representation in, and access to, written text is concomitantly unequal, it is important that students are introduced to multiple ways to understand and think about human experience. The methodology of participant observation destabilises slightly for undergraduate students the authority of written text as the main, and, often singular, source of knowledge.
Final Draft: A Journal of Critical Writing, Young India Fellowship, Ashoka University, 2018
Jay-Z, in Empire State of Mind, raps about the dazzling creative energy of New York, “Eight mill... more Jay-Z, in Empire State of Mind, raps about the dazzling creative energy of New York, “Eight million stories, out there in the naked city.” In India we have 600 million stories out there in the world’s largest democracy. Stories that remain to be thought reflexively about within formal educational structures. India has 600 million young people who have had very few opportunities to — in a structured way — write about and hear each other’s stories as they have navigated their way through an education system (those of them who have been able to access this system) that has focused most strongly on the memorisation and exam-based reproduction of pre-written narratives, even in the humanities and social sciences. Writing within the education system allows for creativity and self-expression, the logical development of ideas, the enhancement of analytical abilities, and the process of critical thinking. If we set apart the short essays that are written under time constraints for exams, the lack of opportunity within the formal system to write longer, take-home pieces has left us creatively constrained.
What India could have learned from France's experience of demonetisation in 1840s. We have demoni... more What India could have learned from France's experience of demonetisation in 1840s. We have demonised the money of the poor - cash - while glorifying that of the rich - card and Paytm.
In this article I examine informal street vending in Istanbul and Calcutta in comparative perspec... more In this article I examine informal street vending in Istanbul and Calcutta in comparative perspective, drawing on field research, secondary sources, and a close reading of Orhan Pamuk's novel A Strangeness in my Mind.
In many cities in the West, large-scale street vending was seen to be unclean, disorderly and undesirable within a modern city. These perceptions of city space made it to many other cities in the Global South, where to be clean and modern was to get rid of the matter-out-of-place that street vending represented. At a time when these cities are aligning themselves with the greater privatization of space, crackdowns on street vendors have increased. Yet, in the West, after many years of the removal paradigm, street life in many avatars, from the local market to the food truck, is now being revitalized and celebrated. So in the cities of the Global South one ends up with piecemeal and uneven adoption of contradictory impulses – removal and celebration – all at the same time, yet both often shaped and targeted by paradigm shifts in Western planning and ideas of the city and urban space. I argue for alternate imaginaries of cities which do not contain a desire to excise street life in favor of mall-ification. In this, perhaps cities in the Global South can begin to dialogue with and consider each other. The orientation and imaginary should not always be towards Western cities, but rather towards other urbanities with some shared, and some divergent experiences.
Recent studies of the post-liberalisation
Indian metropolis have largely followed a theoretical
f... more Recent studies of the post-liberalisation
Indian metropolis have largely followed a theoretical
framework from contemporary urban sociology in the
West, drawn from David Harvey, Manuel Castells and
Saskia Sassen, among others. These studies show the
contemporary city being shaped by global transnational
capital—which accumulates wealth through
dispossession—resulting in a clearing of the poor and
marginal from central urban areas to the periphery,
and replacing them with middle- and upper-class
newcomers. Concomitantly, new jobs in these cities
have shifted from industrial manufacturing to postindustrial
services for large transnational firms connected
through international networks of global capital.
These theories suggest that in the neoliberal city
the welfare state has receded, surrendering its role of
protecting working-class housing and employment to
the interests of transnational capital. We argue that by
identifying processes that unfold in New York or Paris
in New Delhi, these studies only capture a small part of
the picture of urban transformation in contemporary
India. In the case of New Delhi, we show how
Economic Liberalisation has fundamentally restructured
India’s capital city, producing a new iteration of
the ancient metropolis, which we call the ‘‘Tenth
Delhi’’. However, the new order does not, for the most
part, resemble the above-described Western-derived
theories. Instead of jettisoning its poor, Delhi has
become a magnet for the working classes from across
India. There are now more migrants each year to Delhi
than to any other Indian city. Instead of the periphery,
or squatter settlements on the urban edge, the influx of
migrants is found in the oldest settlements of the city,
the so-called Lal Dora areas or ‘‘Urban Villages’’,
where new forms of rental housing have emerged. The
cases of displacement and dispossession in Delhi are
well documented, but little has been written about the
more large-scale phenomena of ‘‘regularisation’’
where hundreds of the ‘‘Unauthorised’’ housing
colonies that exist across the city have been formally
regularised. Through a case study of one neighbourhood
called Taimoor Nagar, which contains a patchwork
of multiple types of spaces, populations and
economic activities, this paper seeks to understand
how things work at a small scale to explain a larger
system, and to identify patterns that repeat across
urban space in terms of spatial ordering, informal
norms, economic relations and political change. We
argue that capital-intensive dispossession has not been
the primary form of urban transformation in post-
Liberalisation New Delhi. The liberalisation of state
control over spaces and types of economic activity and
the expansion of democratically elected representation
in this period has also been dramatically important.
When most of the economy is unregulated, and most
of urban space is unplanned, democratic politics
mediates the relationship between urban citizens and
the rule of law.
Keywords Urban governance Law Informal
economy Informal space Urban planning New
Delhi Urban studies Urban politics India
Studies of globalization in India have focused on high-tech industries, such as call centers
in ... more Studies of globalization in India have focused on high-tech industries, such as call centers
in urban areas. But a widespread effect of the globalization of India’s economy is the
growth of “rural outsourcing”—the expansion of urban-based industries into the
countryside. Rural outsourcing links to longer histories of decentralized manufacturing
in India. This ethnography of the decentralized industry of sari embroidery in Southern
Bengal shows that workers are ambivalent toward it. Among villagers who participate
in the embroidery industry, I found three scales of ambivalence: ambivalence toward
the product; toward the production process; and finally, toward the politics of this form
of decentralized production. Ambivalence is not a transient or uncertain position of
confusion or ambiguity. Rather, it is a widely-held expression of the dual and
contradictory positions that workers and contractors hold in relation to the industry. I
argue that the “frictions” of globalization find expression not just in resistance or
contestation, but also in articulated positions of ambivalence toward globalization
processes.
Introduction
International Review of Social History, 2014
s forty years of field research in the state of Gujarat. This regional ethnographic focus in no w... more s forty years of field research in the state of Gujarat. This regional ethnographic focus in no way limits the conclusions drawn in the book to the case of India alone. Indeed, Breman's theory of informality applies to global political economic processes, as we witness the increasing informalization of labor in the West, and not just in the ''rest''.
Book Reviews by Durba Chattaraj
Scroll.in, 2022
Extended review of the Dawn of Everything
Uploads
Papers by Durba Chattaraj
For in India, the push has been in the opposite direction, towards the Liberal Arts, and towards the expansion of the humanities and Social Sciences. Across the board most educators in in the country agree that sixty years of STEM-focused education has not sufficiently prepared Indian students for an increasingly dynamic job market, or for the many challenges of citizenship in an era of social media, AI, and fake news. So India is creating new Liberal Arts Universities at breakneck speed to make up for this lag, even as its previously Technology-focused institutes, the IITs (Indian Institutes of Technology), have become vastly expanded universities with full-scale humanities and social science faculties. Similar moves are happening in universities across the Global South — in both private institutions and state.
Is this a case of places in the Global South importing a dead technology — that of the Liberal Arts University — at a lag, like their embrace of big hair bands in the 1990s — or is it a moment for the US to look, with genuine concern, at what it is losing when it cuts so deep?
In many cities in the West, large-scale street vending was seen to be unclean, disorderly and undesirable within a modern city. These perceptions of city space made it to many other cities in the Global South, where to be clean and modern was to get rid of the matter-out-of-place that street vending represented. At a time when these cities are aligning themselves with the greater privatization of space, crackdowns on street vendors have increased. Yet, in the West, after many years of the removal paradigm, street life in many avatars, from the local market to the food truck, is now being revitalized and celebrated. So in the cities of the Global South one ends up with piecemeal and uneven adoption of contradictory impulses – removal and celebration – all at the same time, yet both often shaped and targeted by paradigm shifts in Western planning and ideas of the city and urban space. I argue for alternate imaginaries of cities which do not contain a desire to excise street life in favor of mall-ification. In this, perhaps cities in the Global South can begin to dialogue with and consider each other. The orientation and imaginary should not always be towards Western cities, but rather towards other urbanities with some shared, and some divergent experiences.
Indian metropolis have largely followed a theoretical
framework from contemporary urban sociology in the
West, drawn from David Harvey, Manuel Castells and
Saskia Sassen, among others. These studies show the
contemporary city being shaped by global transnational
capital—which accumulates wealth through
dispossession—resulting in a clearing of the poor and
marginal from central urban areas to the periphery,
and replacing them with middle- and upper-class
newcomers. Concomitantly, new jobs in these cities
have shifted from industrial manufacturing to postindustrial
services for large transnational firms connected
through international networks of global capital.
These theories suggest that in the neoliberal city
the welfare state has receded, surrendering its role of
protecting working-class housing and employment to
the interests of transnational capital. We argue that by
identifying processes that unfold in New York or Paris
in New Delhi, these studies only capture a small part of
the picture of urban transformation in contemporary
India. In the case of New Delhi, we show how
Economic Liberalisation has fundamentally restructured
India’s capital city, producing a new iteration of
the ancient metropolis, which we call the ‘‘Tenth
Delhi’’. However, the new order does not, for the most
part, resemble the above-described Western-derived
theories. Instead of jettisoning its poor, Delhi has
become a magnet for the working classes from across
India. There are now more migrants each year to Delhi
than to any other Indian city. Instead of the periphery,
or squatter settlements on the urban edge, the influx of
migrants is found in the oldest settlements of the city,
the so-called Lal Dora areas or ‘‘Urban Villages’’,
where new forms of rental housing have emerged. The
cases of displacement and dispossession in Delhi are
well documented, but little has been written about the
more large-scale phenomena of ‘‘regularisation’’
where hundreds of the ‘‘Unauthorised’’ housing
colonies that exist across the city have been formally
regularised. Through a case study of one neighbourhood
called Taimoor Nagar, which contains a patchwork
of multiple types of spaces, populations and
economic activities, this paper seeks to understand
how things work at a small scale to explain a larger
system, and to identify patterns that repeat across
urban space in terms of spatial ordering, informal
norms, economic relations and political change. We
argue that capital-intensive dispossession has not been
the primary form of urban transformation in post-
Liberalisation New Delhi. The liberalisation of state
control over spaces and types of economic activity and
the expansion of democratically elected representation
in this period has also been dramatically important.
When most of the economy is unregulated, and most
of urban space is unplanned, democratic politics
mediates the relationship between urban citizens and
the rule of law.
Keywords Urban governance Law Informal
economy Informal space Urban planning New
Delhi Urban studies Urban politics India
in urban areas. But a widespread effect of the globalization of India’s economy is the
growth of “rural outsourcing”—the expansion of urban-based industries into the
countryside. Rural outsourcing links to longer histories of decentralized manufacturing
in India. This ethnography of the decentralized industry of sari embroidery in Southern
Bengal shows that workers are ambivalent toward it. Among villagers who participate
in the embroidery industry, I found three scales of ambivalence: ambivalence toward
the product; toward the production process; and finally, toward the politics of this form
of decentralized production. Ambivalence is not a transient or uncertain position of
confusion or ambiguity. Rather, it is a widely-held expression of the dual and
contradictory positions that workers and contractors hold in relation to the industry. I
argue that the “frictions” of globalization find expression not just in resistance or
contestation, but also in articulated positions of ambivalence toward globalization
processes.
Introduction
Book Reviews by Durba Chattaraj
For in India, the push has been in the opposite direction, towards the Liberal Arts, and towards the expansion of the humanities and Social Sciences. Across the board most educators in in the country agree that sixty years of STEM-focused education has not sufficiently prepared Indian students for an increasingly dynamic job market, or for the many challenges of citizenship in an era of social media, AI, and fake news. So India is creating new Liberal Arts Universities at breakneck speed to make up for this lag, even as its previously Technology-focused institutes, the IITs (Indian Institutes of Technology), have become vastly expanded universities with full-scale humanities and social science faculties. Similar moves are happening in universities across the Global South — in both private institutions and state.
Is this a case of places in the Global South importing a dead technology — that of the Liberal Arts University — at a lag, like their embrace of big hair bands in the 1990s — or is it a moment for the US to look, with genuine concern, at what it is losing when it cuts so deep?
In many cities in the West, large-scale street vending was seen to be unclean, disorderly and undesirable within a modern city. These perceptions of city space made it to many other cities in the Global South, where to be clean and modern was to get rid of the matter-out-of-place that street vending represented. At a time when these cities are aligning themselves with the greater privatization of space, crackdowns on street vendors have increased. Yet, in the West, after many years of the removal paradigm, street life in many avatars, from the local market to the food truck, is now being revitalized and celebrated. So in the cities of the Global South one ends up with piecemeal and uneven adoption of contradictory impulses – removal and celebration – all at the same time, yet both often shaped and targeted by paradigm shifts in Western planning and ideas of the city and urban space. I argue for alternate imaginaries of cities which do not contain a desire to excise street life in favor of mall-ification. In this, perhaps cities in the Global South can begin to dialogue with and consider each other. The orientation and imaginary should not always be towards Western cities, but rather towards other urbanities with some shared, and some divergent experiences.
Indian metropolis have largely followed a theoretical
framework from contemporary urban sociology in the
West, drawn from David Harvey, Manuel Castells and
Saskia Sassen, among others. These studies show the
contemporary city being shaped by global transnational
capital—which accumulates wealth through
dispossession—resulting in a clearing of the poor and
marginal from central urban areas to the periphery,
and replacing them with middle- and upper-class
newcomers. Concomitantly, new jobs in these cities
have shifted from industrial manufacturing to postindustrial
services for large transnational firms connected
through international networks of global capital.
These theories suggest that in the neoliberal city
the welfare state has receded, surrendering its role of
protecting working-class housing and employment to
the interests of transnational capital. We argue that by
identifying processes that unfold in New York or Paris
in New Delhi, these studies only capture a small part of
the picture of urban transformation in contemporary
India. In the case of New Delhi, we show how
Economic Liberalisation has fundamentally restructured
India’s capital city, producing a new iteration of
the ancient metropolis, which we call the ‘‘Tenth
Delhi’’. However, the new order does not, for the most
part, resemble the above-described Western-derived
theories. Instead of jettisoning its poor, Delhi has
become a magnet for the working classes from across
India. There are now more migrants each year to Delhi
than to any other Indian city. Instead of the periphery,
or squatter settlements on the urban edge, the influx of
migrants is found in the oldest settlements of the city,
the so-called Lal Dora areas or ‘‘Urban Villages’’,
where new forms of rental housing have emerged. The
cases of displacement and dispossession in Delhi are
well documented, but little has been written about the
more large-scale phenomena of ‘‘regularisation’’
where hundreds of the ‘‘Unauthorised’’ housing
colonies that exist across the city have been formally
regularised. Through a case study of one neighbourhood
called Taimoor Nagar, which contains a patchwork
of multiple types of spaces, populations and
economic activities, this paper seeks to understand
how things work at a small scale to explain a larger
system, and to identify patterns that repeat across
urban space in terms of spatial ordering, informal
norms, economic relations and political change. We
argue that capital-intensive dispossession has not been
the primary form of urban transformation in post-
Liberalisation New Delhi. The liberalisation of state
control over spaces and types of economic activity and
the expansion of democratically elected representation
in this period has also been dramatically important.
When most of the economy is unregulated, and most
of urban space is unplanned, democratic politics
mediates the relationship between urban citizens and
the rule of law.
Keywords Urban governance Law Informal
economy Informal space Urban planning New
Delhi Urban studies Urban politics India
in urban areas. But a widespread effect of the globalization of India’s economy is the
growth of “rural outsourcing”—the expansion of urban-based industries into the
countryside. Rural outsourcing links to longer histories of decentralized manufacturing
in India. This ethnography of the decentralized industry of sari embroidery in Southern
Bengal shows that workers are ambivalent toward it. Among villagers who participate
in the embroidery industry, I found three scales of ambivalence: ambivalence toward
the product; toward the production process; and finally, toward the politics of this form
of decentralized production. Ambivalence is not a transient or uncertain position of
confusion or ambiguity. Rather, it is a widely-held expression of the dual and
contradictory positions that workers and contractors hold in relation to the industry. I
argue that the “frictions” of globalization find expression not just in resistance or
contestation, but also in articulated positions of ambivalence toward globalization
processes.
Introduction