Events

CHAIRPERSON

Dr Minna Valjakka, Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore

ABSTRACT

This presentation will highlight the informal, creative enterprises developed by the unbanked urban poor in order to monetise, circumvent and survive the demonetisation crisis in India. Between November 2016 and January 2017, the Government of India announced the demonetization of large currency notes, which meant that 80% of national currency units were ‘retired’ as legal tender. In an unscheduled televised address, Prime Minister Narendra Modi stated that people could deposit their old cash (until 30 December 2016), and new rupee notes would be issued to them. Giant crowds flocked to banks and ATMs to exchange old notes for new denominations. The police were summoned at many bank branches across the region, to calm down agitated people waiting for long hours in the sun. According to several economists, the demonetisation policy deeply affected cash-reliant, informal and small-scale businesses in the city, compelling many poor communities to migrate away from urban centres. Using a slum in Calcutta, a city in eastern India, as my ethnographic landscape, I want to highlight how sections of the urban poor collectively brought forward skills and competences to resist penury and out-migration (such as offering a service to step in for elderly, pregnant and disabled people unable to queue at the bank for long hours; designing a borrowing and barter system in the slum to cope with the absence of legal cash in circulation; and even guarding decaying corpses temporarily deserted in the city crematorium in exchange for a fee, as grieving family members dashed around to collect legal cash to pay for the last rites). I argue that these temporary networks and services cropped-up and fizzled out in the face of the demonetisation crisis and the imposition of biometric identification cards/technologies, but these transactions addressed contemporary academic concerns on urban financial wisdom, relational politics, and spatial knowledge related to cashlessness (and the fading materiality of money) in commercial cities.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Atreyee Sen is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Copenhagen. She is a political anthropologist of urban South Asia. She is the author of Shiv Sena Women: Violence and Communalism in a Bombay Slum (Hurst and Co. London, Indiana University Press 2007) and co-editor (with Dr David Pratten) of Global Vigilantes (Columbia University Press 2008). Her most recent publications are ‘Teach your girls to stab, not sing: Right-wing activism, public knife distribution and the politics of gendered self-defense in Mumbai’ (Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 2019) and ‘Loose girls bring bad boys into safe neighborhoods’: Analysing security anxieties and the everyday logics of blurred moral policing in urban India (in Erella Grassiani and Tessa Diphoorn eds, Security Blurs: The Politics of Plural Security Provision, Routledge 2019).

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