Senior Research Seminar with Professor Sanjay Srivastava (SOAS)

Entangled Sovereignties: New Land Markets and the aspirations of a 'Criminal Caste' in Gurugram, Haryana (India)

Professor Sanjay Srivastava (SOAS, University of London)

Over the past three decades, the largely rural district of Gurugram in Haryana has witnessed intense urbanisation and land monetisation. The local Gujjar community is the most recent beneficiary of the new market in land. Gujjars are a ‘Denotified Tribe’. That is, their names have been taken off the list of ‘Criminal Castes and Tribes’ promulgated during the colonial era. The stigma of ‘criminality’ is, however, frequently discussed and frequently expressed as the incapacity for self-definition and stereotyping by the state. Strategies of ‘recuperation’ of sovereignty of Gujjar identity do not, however, involve eschewing caste identity but, rather, its re-inscription in Gurugram’s urban modernity. Gujjar communities in Gurugram utilize a variety of strategies towards this end, utilising new land wealth towards inscribing ‘Gujjar-ness’ into the urban landscape. These include the refashioning of domestic spaces and weddings; road signs that list Gujjars in ‘important’ government positions; and a recently inaugurated Gujjar Mahotsav (festival) that showcases Gujjar culture. In this presentation, I provide an ethnography of ‘sovereignty’ in order explore the ways in which a new and sovereign Gujjar self is imagined through the same processes – of the state and capital – that are blamed for producing Gujjar incapacity and subalternity. Rather than treat 'sovereignty' as a matter of 'state-ness', I present it as the grounds for negotiations between the state, private capital and citizens regarding mutually agreeable self-definition.

 

Sanjay Srivastava is Distinguished Research Professor in the Department of Anthropology at SOAS University of London. His key publications include Constructing Post-colonial India: National Character and the Doon School (1998); Passionate Modernity, Sexuality, Class and Consumption in India (2007); Entangled Urbanism: Slum, Gated Community and Shopping Mall in Delhi and Gurgaon (OUP, 2015); and Masculinity Consumerism and the Post-National Indian City. Streets, Neighbourhoods, Home (2022). From 2012 to 2016, he was co-editor of the journal Contributions to Indian Sociology. His current research focuses on new land markets, caste identity and changing relationships between the state, private capital and farmers at rural-urban localities in Gurugram, Haryana. He is currently. working on a manuscript entitled ‘Spirits, Satellites and Land Markets. Urbanism, Caste and the Globalism of the Indian Peasant’.