Attachments to Hurt: The Intimate Economy of Mobility and Enterprise in the Indian Himalayas
Date of Award
Fall 2023
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Department
Anthropology
First Advisor
Sivaramakrishnan, Kalyanakrishnan
Abstract
In this dissertation, I examine how ‘attachments to hurt’ become central to the construction of a region, its landscape, and its predominant caste identity. How is hurt experienced and claimed, especially when it is constitutive of a majority and majoritarian upper-caste demography of a region which is otherwise ‘remote’ and marginalized from mainstream development? Situated in the urbanizing hill towns and villages of Uttarakhand in North India, this dissertation presents an ethnographic account, a social history and an affective theory of mobility, enterprise, and caste through the story of ‘drivery’ – an entrepreneurial pursuit of automobility – and its entanglements with hurt. It is an account of the contradictions of democratizing neo-liberal India which centres the gendered attachments of upper-caste-ness to a politics of hurt and a risk economy of entrepreneurship. More than often, hurt is studied as a constitutive expression of the historically oppressed and marginalized. This dissertation centres on the contradictions of hurt as a social fact when it becomes constitutive of the politics of the dominant caste elite. It describes how attachments to hurt are reproduced in the masculinized entrepreneurial and development ethos of Uttarakhand through ethnographic biographies, social histories, and colonial archives where accounts of hurt as unreciprocated attachments to the promise of region, love and development are central. Hurt, in these accounts is not merely a register of affects and attachments; it is integral to and constitutes the politics of federalism, enterprise, caste, masculinity and finance in Uttarakhand. These accounts provide a critically broad view on caste in contemporary India by examining the upper-caste attachments to ‘hurt’ in a predominantly upper-caste demography where upper-caste identity is reproduced and secured through attachments to hurt. In the landscape of growing concerns with majoritarianism across the world, often built on a politics of hurt of the majority, this dissertation examines how they stick together and offers the study of the intimate life of a global condition. This dissertation is organized around the nested domains of hurt – the contradictions of development in the Indian Himalayas, the travails of caste reproduction and democratization, the impossibilities of love, desire, intimacy, death and disaster across a sacred geography and the ambivalence of trust and obligations. Each of the chapters of the dissertation delves into an aspect of the nesting of such attachments to hurt. Drawing on over two years of ethnographic research, it examines how hurt is interwoven into the life and landscape of drivery in the entrepreneurial self-reformation of drivers in a changing hill economy as jilted lovers, blighted alcoholics, and righteous householders. Given the sacredness of the landscape of Uttarakhand as devbhoomi (land of gods), this dissertation traces the transformation of mobility and its infrastructure in its interaction with the ‘hurt’ sacred landscape in an ecologically fragile and disaster-prone region. It also analyzes how the entrepreneurialism of drivery navigates the intimate obligations of kinship and friendship in an economy of risk, cash and hurt. Attachments to hurt revisits the the story of liberalization and its discontents in modernizing India to tell the story of a regional identity, entrepreneurial self-reformation, and masculinity in a remote-frontier-hill geography that historicizes the hurt claimed as a caste entitlement.
Recommended Citation
Joshi, Bhoomika, "Attachments to Hurt: The Intimate Economy of Mobility and Enterprise in the Indian Himalayas" (2023). Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations. 1165.
https://elischolar.library.yale.edu/gsas_dissertations/1165
