Doctoral fieldwork yields new insights on contemporary India

In Fall 2012, four PhD candidates in Anthropology and Political Science returned to Yale after completing extended dissertation fieldwork in India. From adivasi politics in western and eastern India, to ethnic minority voting in Uttar Pradesh and, farther north, human-animal relations in Uttarakhand, these projects provide an indication of the diversity of field-based research emerging from Yale’s graduate programs in the social and human sciences.

Vikramaditya Thakur and Uday Chandra share an interest in the contemporary politics of adivasi communities, though their research speaks to the very different ways in which it develops and comes to be expressed. Working for two years as a political activist on issues of resettlement and land rights after completing a Master’s degree in Economics, Vikram chose to pursue a PhD in sociocultural Anthropology so that he might focus his dissertation research on the resettlement to the plains of hill villages inhabited by Bhils and other ethnic groups following the construction of the Sardar Sarovar dam on the Narmada river in western India. Over the course of two years, from July 2010 to August 2012, and with the support of grants from Yale’s MacMillan Center, Agrarian Studies program, and the American Institute of Indian Studies, Vikram pursued ethnographic fieldwork in the Satpura hills and examined colonial and postcolonial records of the region.

In Jharkhand, eastern India, Uday Chandra, a PhD candidate in Political Science, revisited classic questions of power and resistance through a study of the origins and social bases of the ongoing Maoist insurgency in India. With a grant from the American Institute of Indian Studies, Uday conducted ethnographic fieldwork in the forests of eastern India.  Living among the indigenous peoples or adivasis of central Jharkhand and listening to their songs, stories and histories, Uday remarks that he realized that – contrary to what is often claimed - that the men and women living in these forests did not take up arms due to their ethnicity or poverty. Instead, “tribal” identity, underdevelopment, and inequality were consequences, not causes, of their historical relationship to colonial and postcolonial Indian states. Combining ethnography with fine-grained archival research he discovered that, in the past and present, armed resistance has limited itself strategically to specific targets, and has been inseparable from peaceful forms of political claim-making on rural powerholders via petitions and demonstrations. In the margins of modern India, therefore, continual negotiations, whether peaceful or violent, legal or extra-legal, occur between the state and its “tribal” subjects. His dissertation further explores how these margins thus emerge as much as blindspots for the state as sites of creative political dissent by those who have been subordinated by and excluded from a diverse, complex society.

Questions of identity are approached differently in the dissertation project pursued by Political Science PhD candidate, Madhavi Devasher. With a dissertation research grant from Yale’s MacMillan center,  Madhavi focused on ethnic voting in Uttar Pradesh, India, and now aims to develop a theory to explain how minority voters analyze the electoral arena and rank their varied and often conflicting preferences of outcomes at the electoral constituency (district) and state level to make a decision about how to vote. To complete this research, Madhavi conducted a unique survey of 1600 Muslim voters in Uttar Pradesh during the 2012 Assembly Elections in order to gather data on vote choices, issue preferences and demographics. She also interviewed politicians from all major parties and individual voters before and after the elections in order to study party political strategies and the importance of electoral outcomes for individuals.

Radhika Govindrajan, a PhD candidate in sociocultural anthropology, conducted eighteen months of fieldwork in a cluster of mountain villages in Uttarakhand between 2010 and 2012 with support from the American Institute of Indian Studies and the MacMillan Center at Yale University.  The research on which her fieldwork is based examines how people’s daily interactions with wild and domestic animals in villages across Kumaon play an important part in shaping overlapping conversations about regional, cultural and religious identity, rural development, agrarian change and wildlife conservation. A significant aspect of her research explores the affective dimensions of ritual sacrifice in the wider context of domestication, changes in the agrarian landscape and culture of the region fueled by speculation in land, human-wildlife conflict and state-enforced conservation policies, and regional politics as manifested in debates over ‘local’ and ‘migrant’ animals.