10:00 AM - 11:00 AM (Pacific Time)

VIDEO

ABOUT THE PRESENTATION

In Indian-administered Kashmir, traders use the phrase “trust deficit” both to question the Indian state’s legitimacy, and to express ambivalence about continuing informal transactions in a war economy. Despite curtailment by political violence and mistrust, trust-based informal credit remained the basis for capital and commodity circulation in the marketplace, challenging normative understandings of trust as a pre-requisite for credit. I examine how traders maintained economic relations amidst violence by bending the orthodox rules of forecast that are commonly drawn upon to determine credit transactions. Instead, the open temporal dynamic between trust and credit emerged as a site for traders to transform commercial and political relations in the flux of war and uncertain futures and forge collectivities that, however tenuous, resist the communalized narratives that frame the Kashmir conflict.

Aditi Saraf is Assistant Professor of Sociology and Anthropology at Ashoka University. Her current book project, tentatively titled Frontier Signatures investigates the relationship between commerce and sovereignty in the Kashmir region. Combining ethnographic and archival work, her research interests revolve around questions of political economy, frontiers and mobility, militarization and place-making practices.

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Download file: Aditi-Saraf-jk-jhs.pdf

Sponsor(s): Center for India and South Asia