Isha’s Wait: money, love, and kinship in the wake of domestic violence in India
On the 22 October, the Sussex Asia Centre is joined by Dr. Garima Jaju - a Smuts Research Fellow with the Centre of South Asian Studies, University of Cambridge - as they give a seminar on "Isha’s Wait: money, love, and kinship in the wake of domestic violence in India".
The seminar takes place in Arts C, C333 at 1pm.
Abstract:
Isha waits in her low-income parent’s home for her estranged husband, charged for dowry and domestic violence, to pay her the legally mandated ‘maintenance money’. I listen to her as she talks about pyaar, or love, and domestic violence as arising from the absence of its ehsaas, or feeling/realization, by the abusive husband. The awaited money is infused with the hopeful imagination that it will generate both pyaar and its ehsaas. I argue that money becomes a substance of kinship that is assigned an agentive role in engendering the ethical transformation of a ‘bad’ husband to create ‘good’ kinship. Exploring the ways in which the tenuous legal promise of money sustains imaginations of reformed kinship futures, I outline how centrally money shapes the experience of domestic violence and the dealing of its aftermath.