WHEN: Friday 3rd May 2024

12pm - 1pm BST / 4.30pm - 5.30pm IST

WHERE: Online (MS Teams)

Seminar speaker:

Samprati Pani is a social anthropologist working at the intersection of urban studies, the anthropology of markets, and the philosophy of process. She is currently a postdoctoral research fellow at the Max Weber Forum for South Asian Studies, New Delhi, where she is working on a project on repair and maintenance practices in urban neighbourhood markets. Her larger research traces the social, material, and affective life of weekly bazaars in Delhi.

Her areas of interest span marketplace socialities, shop signage and design, urban spatial formations, and walking as a research technique. She is the editor of the blog Chiragh Dilli, which explores forms of writing the city. Her writings on the blog explore everyday modes of walking, street life, and the ordinary city.

This paper examines the negotiation of constraint and freedom in the entangled practices of bazaar karna (provisioning) and ghoomna (walking in the bazaar) engaged in by women from the low-income neighbourhood of Nizamuddin Basti in Delhi. The paper traces the techniques involved in these practices, in particular thrift, that women deploy in provisioning for the everyday needs of their households. Based on 18 months of fieldwork conducted in the weekly bazaar, an informal street market that comes up in the neighbourhood every Monday, the paper argues that shopping is not non-work or non-productive, neither is it purely leisure or voluntary. It also illustrates how provisioning is not about acquiring and using up goods but paths and processes of procuring goods, planning for it, and making things last.

Provisioning comprises activities, responsibilities, and needs that are never completed, that must be continuously performed and performed well. The family has to be fed and clothed, children have to be supplied with stationery and toys, gifts need to be selected for festivals and birthdays, the mixie needs to be repaired and made to last longer, the family outing with the treat of chole bhature and ice cream has to be planned. These seemingly mundane tasks involve labour and knowledge, the doing of which women continuously negotiate and hone.

This ‘doing’ involves both the reproduction of gendered responsibilities as well as the negotiation of freedom and assertion of selves. Moreover, it is also productive work: managing resources and running the household, creating savings and forms of self-care, and transforming an ordinary bazaar into a place that the women consider as theirs—what they refer to as hamara bazaar.

The Laws of Social Reproduction project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (under grant agreement No. 772946).

For more information about the project, please email Prabha.kotiswaran@kcl.ac.uk.