Senior Research Seminar with Dr Akanksha Awal (SOAS)

In this paper, I show how enjoyment, or a short-lived kind of love, leaves traces of the past, and provides possibilities for the future in people’s lives across space and time in urbanising Ghaziabad.  Based on an ethnography of college-going young women, I do so by unpacking the use of the otherworldly metaphor of ‘hava’ to parse the mythical and the phantasmic figurations in the city.  I do so in three ways: first, I show how hava, a polysemic term that colloquially means air or atmosphere, can, in another register, be an accusation that women who enjoy are possessed, or have a mental affliction. Second, I focus on how women in Ghaziabad negotiate marriages with their families after enjoying with their friends and boyfriends in college. Third, I work through how enjoyment is discussed, stigmatised, and written off by a range of actors—government programmes that sponsor women’s education, societal elders grappling with social change, priests in temples, and women’s mothers. Across the three themes, I show enjoyments trace the pasts of women’s lives. Sometimes, these figurations emerge in the form of more-than-alive figures in Bollywood; at other times, they are evoked through discussions of aborted foetuses or women relegated to mental asylums because they enjoyed too much. Ghaziabad’s material landscape—the education institutions, the malls, the temples—carries the weight of these lives, exuding an affective discharge and allowing young women to rework their futures in light of these figurations.