Indivar Jonnalagadda publishes two articles in Spring 2023
Long-time member Indivar Jonnalagadda published two articles during the Spring semester 2023.
In February he published a co-authored article titled Cultural Ecologies of Urban Lakes: The Bathukamma Festival, Caste Associations and Resource Claims in Hyderabad, written with Pullanna Vidyapogu, in Economic & Political Weekly.
And in March, he published a single authored article in The Cambridge Journal of Anthropology. Waiting for Dignity Housing: Slum Redevelopment, Cruel Governance and Unaccounted Time in Hyderabad tracks a housing scheme introduced in Hyderabad, India in order to develop an argument about how existing forms of governance cyclically enact a suspension of poor people's lives and often dispossess the poor of one set of rights in the process of delivering another set. In their own descriptions of these schemes, displaced communities emphatically account for the forms of suffering they repeatedly incur, which are unaccounted for in the records of the state. In their experience, governance is not only arbitrary and labyrinthine, but it also entails necessary experiences of dispossession that ironically accompany schemes for their development. This regime of dispossession that chronically underlies schemes for poverty alleviation is what Jonnalagadda calls ‘cruel governance’. Over time, this mode of development accompanied by dispossession has resulted in cynical realignments of subaltern politics towards the state and its projects.