Tarini Bedi
Biographic Data
| ID | 104901 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Tarini Bedi |
| GIVEN NAMES | Tarini |
| FAMILY NAME | Bedi |
| SIGNATURE | BEDI T |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Illinois Chicago |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-5876-5928 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 17 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 45 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 16 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2012 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
The Spatial and Infrastructural Relations of Democratic Practice
Conclusion
This conclusion reflects on the overall development of this volume, on our engagements with the writings of our contributors, and on the living, emergent shifts from our initial introduction to the mobilities turn as anthropologists and South Asianists. It also reflects on how to bring a mobilities orientation into a classroom and into fieldwork in South Asia and beyond. I provide some concrete ways that mobilities scholars could translate paradi…
South Asia on the Move
South Asia on the Move
The “new mobilities paradigm” (or “mobilities turn”) has been one of the most fertile attempts at trans-/post-disciplinary scholarship in recent social theory. Yet notwithstanding its strides towards topical and geographical diversity, there remains a relative lacuna of studies about non-Western lifeworlds and contexts. South Asia—home to nearly one-fourth of the world’s population, and with a diaspora spanning the entire world—has a particular e…
Bumpy Roads, Dusty Air
I decouple the commonly discussed ecological destruction and unsustainability wrought by cars from a discussion of what life lived and sustained around automobiles looks like. Through fieldwork with hereditary Muslim taxi drivers in Mumbai, I look at urban ecological relations with those who work in what I call sensate ecologies. A sensate-ecologies approach connects labor and urban ecology and argues for a collective rather than an individual su…
Dhandha , Accumulation and the Making of Valuable Livelihoods in Contemporary Mumbai 1
In this paper, our main objective is to pay attention to social and material accumulations in a form of self-employed work practised by non-elites in the Indian city of Mumbai, which they call dhandha. Using ethnographic examples of two working-class, urban dhandhas—taxi-driving and vending—we suggest that thinking with the concept of dhandha and other conceptions of value and relationality that people associate with this kind of work helps us re…
Feminist pedagogy through the small fieldnote
This collectively written essay reflects collaborations between three graduate students and their dissertation advisor. We turn to inspirations like Zora Neale Hurston to make our fieldnotes central to collective writing, thinking and translation across language and discursive traditions. We use small fieldnote in a subversive sense to illustrate a feminist mode of this pedagogical exercise and to refuse foreclosure of our analysis. We push back …
Thinking through Urban Obsolescence
In this article I use the lens of Bombay/Mumbai's taxi trade from the early twentieth century to the present to examine how obsolescence becomes ingrained in the political and public imagination, and how this can illuminate the contradictory experiences of time in changing cities. Based on a labor‐centric approach to transport infrastructure, I ask what happens when particular technologies and linear understandings of progress rooted in obsolesce…
Urban Histories of Place and Labour
When it comes to historical and ethnographic accounts of transport labour outside the West, scholars have only recently intervened to correct the paucity of systematic scholarship in this area. This article is in conversation with scholarship in both labour history and urban anthropology through which it links the modern history of a particular mode of urban transport (the taxi) and the labouring history of those who drive, move, and fix it. Thro…
Mardistan (Macholand) Harjant Gill, dir. 28 min. New Delhi, India
The Dashing Ladies of Shiv Sena
"Explores the activities and political personas of women activists in Shiv Sena, a militant Indian political party. Rich in detail, this book tells the stories of women of Shiv Sena (Shivaji's Army), a militant political party in Western India. It provides insight into the political networks powered by lower-level women politicians in postcolonial, globalizing cities and on their margins. Based on more than ten years of in-depth ethnographic fiel…
Network not Paperwork
I heard Durva, a fearless leader in the Indian political party,Shiv Sena(Shivaji's Army) repeat this poetic refrain in many of her public speeches. She invariably received rousing applause and breathless admiration from the audiences she addressed. Many junior party workers and female constituents who listened in awe at the large women's rallies she organized around the elections began to repeat this in their own lives and in their political camp…
Mimicry, friction and trans-urban imaginaries
As Mumbai globalizes, the city's aesthetic, aspirational, and imaginative transformations draw from other commercial centers in Asia. Mumbai's owner-operated and hereditary kaalipeeli (black and yellow) taxi-trade is being modeled along the lines of Singapore's fleet-taxi industry. This paper focuses on the political and cultural transformations that accompany this 'Singapore model' as manifest in contemporary Mumbai's taxi-trade. Through a discu…
Taxi Drivers, Infrastructures, and Urban Change in Globalizing Mumbai
This paper focusses on taxis and the taxi industry in relationship to crisis and change in contemporary Mumbai. Through an ethnographic exploration of Mumbai's taxi modernization project, changes in the material aspects of the taxi and taxi system, and a community of hereditary taxi drivers known as chillia, I examine ways that infrastructure is understood, practiced, and contested. Focusing on how chillia drivers negotiate livelihoods in the con…
Journeys and Their Afterlives
This piece is about the disjointed experiences of death, grief, and gendered Hindu religiosity in contemporary India. The religious rituals surrounding death animate journeys of all kinds-between the spaces of these rituals; between religious belief and skepticism; between the sentimentality of the past and the present realities of loss; between home, kinship obligations, and a transnational world; and between changing norms of the family. [death…
The Everyday Politics of Hindu Lives in India
Motherhood, and its “lack
Taxi Drivers, Infrastructures, and Urban Change in Globalizing Mumbai
This paper focusses on taxis and the taxi industry in relationship to crisis and change in contemporary Mumbai. Through an ethnographic exploration of Mumbai's taxi modernization project, changes in the material aspects of the taxi and taxi system, and a community of hereditary taxi drivers known as chillia, I examine ways that infrastructure is understood, practiced, and contested. Focusing on how chillia drivers negotiate livelihoods in the con…
Urban Histories of Place and Labour
When it comes to historical and ethnographic accounts of transport labour outside the West, scholars have only recently intervened to correct the paucity of systematic scholarship in this area. This article is in conversation with scholarship in both labour history and urban anthropology through which it links the modern history of a particular mode of urban transport (the taxi) and the labouring history of those who drive, move, and fix it. Thro…
The Dashing Ladies of Shiv Sena
"Explores the activities and political personas of women activists in Shiv Sena, a militant Indian political party. Rich in detail, this book tells the stories of women of Shiv Sena (Shivaji's Army), a militant political party in Western India. It provides insight into the political networks powered by lower-level women politicians in postcolonial, globalizing cities and on their margins. Based on more than ten years of in-depth ethnographic fiel…
Bumpy Roads, Dusty Air
I decouple the commonly discussed ecological destruction and unsustainability wrought by cars from a discussion of what life lived and sustained around automobiles looks like. Through fieldwork with hereditary Muslim taxi drivers in Mumbai, I look at urban ecological relations with those who work in what I call sensate ecologies. A sensate-ecologies approach connects labor and urban ecology and argues for a collective rather than an individual su…
Thinking through Urban Obsolescence
In this article I use the lens of Bombay/Mumbai's taxi trade from the early twentieth century to the present to examine how obsolescence becomes ingrained in the political and public imagination, and how this can illuminate the contradictory experiences of time in changing cities. Based on a labor‐centric approach to transport infrastructure, I ask what happens when particular technologies and linear understandings of progress rooted in obsolesce…
Mimicry, friction and trans-urban imaginaries
As Mumbai globalizes, the city's aesthetic, aspirational, and imaginative transformations draw from other commercial centers in Asia. Mumbai's owner-operated and hereditary kaalipeeli (black and yellow) taxi-trade is being modeled along the lines of Singapore's fleet-taxi industry. This paper focuses on the political and cultural transformations that accompany this 'Singapore model' as manifest in contemporary Mumbai's taxi-trade. Through a discu…
Network not Paperwork
I heard Durva, a fearless leader in the Indian political party,Shiv Sena(Shivaji's Army) repeat this poetic refrain in many of her public speeches. She invariably received rousing applause and breathless admiration from the audiences she addressed. Many junior party workers and female constituents who listened in awe at the large women's rallies she organized around the elections began to repeat this in their own lives and in their political camp…
Dhandha , Accumulation and the Making of Valuable Livelihoods in Contemporary Mumbai 1
In this paper, our main objective is to pay attention to social and material accumulations in a form of self-employed work practised by non-elites in the Indian city of Mumbai, which they call dhandha. Using ethnographic examples of two working-class, urban dhandhas—taxi-driving and vending—we suggest that thinking with the concept of dhandha and other conceptions of value and relationality that people associate with this kind of work helps us re…
Motherhood, and its “lack
The Everyday Politics of Hindu Lives in India
Mardistan (Macholand) Harjant Gill, dir. 28 min. New Delhi, India
The Dashing Ladies of Shiv Sena
"Explores the activities and political personas of women activists in Shiv Sena, a militant Indian political party. Rich in detail, this book tells the stories of women of Shiv Sena (Shivaji's Army), a militant political party in Western India. It provides insight into the political networks powered by lower-level women politicians in postcolonial, globalizing cities and on their margins. Based on more than ten years of in-depth ethnographic fiel…
Network not Paperwork
I heard Durva, a fearless leader in the Indian political party,Shiv Sena(Shivaji's Army) repeat this poetic refrain in many of her public speeches. She invariably received rousing applause and breathless admiration from the audiences she addressed. Many junior party workers and female constituents who listened in awe at the large women's rallies she organized around the elections began to repeat this in their own lives and in their political camp…
Mimicry, friction and trans-urban imaginaries
As Mumbai globalizes, the city's aesthetic, aspirational, and imaginative transformations draw from other commercial centers in Asia. Mumbai's owner-operated and hereditary kaalipeeli (black and yellow) taxi-trade is being modeled along the lines of Singapore's fleet-taxi industry. This paper focuses on the political and cultural transformations that accompany this 'Singapore model' as manifest in contemporary Mumbai's taxi-trade. Through a discu…
Taxi Drivers, Infrastructures, and Urban Change in Globalizing Mumbai
This paper focusses on taxis and the taxi industry in relationship to crisis and change in contemporary Mumbai. Through an ethnographic exploration of Mumbai's taxi modernization project, changes in the material aspects of the taxi and taxi system, and a community of hereditary taxi drivers known as chillia, I examine ways that infrastructure is understood, practiced, and contested. Focusing on how chillia drivers negotiate livelihoods in the con…
Journeys and Their Afterlives
This piece is about the disjointed experiences of death, grief, and gendered Hindu religiosity in contemporary India. The religious rituals surrounding death animate journeys of all kinds-between the spaces of these rituals; between religious belief and skepticism; between the sentimentality of the past and the present realities of loss; between home, kinship obligations, and a transnational world; and between changing norms of the family. [death…
Urban Histories of Place and Labour
When it comes to historical and ethnographic accounts of transport labour outside the West, scholars have only recently intervened to correct the paucity of systematic scholarship in this area. This article is in conversation with scholarship in both labour history and urban anthropology through which it links the modern history of a particular mode of urban transport (the taxi) and the labouring history of those who drive, move, and fix it. Thro…
Thinking through Urban Obsolescence
In this article I use the lens of Bombay/Mumbai's taxi trade from the early twentieth century to the present to examine how obsolescence becomes ingrained in the political and public imagination, and how this can illuminate the contradictory experiences of time in changing cities. Based on a labor‐centric approach to transport infrastructure, I ask what happens when particular technologies and linear understandings of progress rooted in obsolesce…
Feminist pedagogy through the small fieldnote
This collectively written essay reflects collaborations between three graduate students and their dissertation advisor. We turn to inspirations like Zora Neale Hurston to make our fieldnotes central to collective writing, thinking and translation across language and discursive traditions. We use small fieldnote in a subversive sense to illustrate a feminist mode of this pedagogical exercise and to refuse foreclosure of our analysis. We push back …
Dhandha , Accumulation and the Making of Valuable Livelihoods in Contemporary Mumbai 1
In this paper, our main objective is to pay attention to social and material accumulations in a form of self-employed work practised by non-elites in the Indian city of Mumbai, which they call dhandha. Using ethnographic examples of two working-class, urban dhandhas—taxi-driving and vending—we suggest that thinking with the concept of dhandha and other conceptions of value and relationality that people associate with this kind of work helps us re…
Bumpy Roads, Dusty Air
I decouple the commonly discussed ecological destruction and unsustainability wrought by cars from a discussion of what life lived and sustained around automobiles looks like. Through fieldwork with hereditary Muslim taxi drivers in Mumbai, I look at urban ecological relations with those who work in what I call sensate ecologies. A sensate-ecologies approach connects labor and urban ecology and argues for a collective rather than an individual su…
South Asia on the Move
South Asia on the Move
The “new mobilities paradigm” (or “mobilities turn”) has been one of the most fertile attempts at trans-/post-disciplinary scholarship in recent social theory. Yet notwithstanding its strides towards topical and geographical diversity, there remains a relative lacuna of studies about non-Western lifeworlds and contexts. South Asia—home to nearly one-fourth of the world’s population, and with a diaspora spanning the entire world—has a particular e…
Conclusion
This conclusion reflects on the overall development of this volume, on our engagements with the writings of our contributors, and on the living, emergent shifts from our initial introduction to the mobilities turn as anthropologists and South Asianists. It also reflects on how to bring a mobilities orientation into a classroom and into fieldwork in South Asia and beyond. I provide some concrete ways that mobilities scholars could translate paradi…
The Spatial and Infrastructural Relations of Democratic Practice
Sociology (9 works) · Political science (8 works) · Gender Studies (6 works) · Philosophy (6 works) · Politics (6 works) · Anthropological Studies and Insights (5 works) · Law (5 works) · Law (5 works) · Urban Planning and Governance (5 works) · Water Governance and Infrastructure (5 works)