Tarini Bedi – författare

Best Read for the General Public: IBP 2023 Accolades in the Humanities by the International Institute for Asian Studies 2nd Prize Winner of the 2022 Victor Turner Prize sponsored by the Society for Humanistic AnthropologyBrings to life the smells, sounds, vibrations, discomforts, and joys of taxi travel in India’s largest cityIn this first book-length study of Mumbai’s taxi industry and of the livelihoods that surround it, Tarini Bedi draws from the lives and voices of chillia taxi drivers who have sustained a hereditary trade for more than a century. Bedi considers the Bombay taxi in all its forms: a material object that is driven, an economic and political connection, an expression of kinship, an embodiment of urban time and technology, and more. She illustrates how the accumulation of capital in this masculinized and mobile trade depends on forms of fixed domestic labor and an ethics of care, and how connections among these factors impact the production and reshaping of working-class personhood and laboring subjects. From beginning to end, the world of Mumbai automobility unfolds through depiction of the sensory, embodied, and political domains of taxi drivers’ work.While most understandings of automobility remain tied to Western assumptions, patterns of driving, (sub)urbanization, and engagements with the road, realities in the Global South differ. Mumbai Taximen provides a correction to this imbalance from Mumbai through a timely exploration of South Asian social, material, political, labor, and technological histories and practices of motoring and automobility.

Best Read for the General Public: IBP 2023 Accolades in the Humanities by the International Institute for Asian Studies 2nd Prize Winner of the 2022 Victor Turner Prize sponsored by the Society for Humanistic AnthropologyBrings to life the smells, sounds, vibrations, discomforts, and joys of taxi travel in India’s largest cityIn this first book-length study of Mumbai’s taxi industry and of the livelihoods that surround it, Tarini Bedi draws from the lives and voices of chillia taxi drivers who have sustained a hereditary trade for more than a century. Bedi considers the Bombay taxi in all its forms: a material object that is driven, an economic and political connection, an expression of kinship, an embodiment of urban time and technology, and more. She illustrates how the accumulation of capital in this masculinized and mobile trade depends on forms of fixed domestic labor and an ethics of care, and how connections among these factors impact the production and reshaping of working-class personhood and laboring subjects. From beginning to end, the world of Mumbai automobility unfolds through depiction of the sensory, embodied, and political domains of taxi drivers’ work.While most understandings of automobility remain tied to Western assumptions, patterns of driving, (sub)urbanization, and engagements with the road, realities in the Global South differ. Mumbai Taximen provides a correction to this imbalance from Mumbai through a timely exploration of South Asian social, material, political, labor, and technological histories and practices of motoring and automobility.

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 fieldwork with the women of Shiv Sena, the work shows how women political activists in urbanizing India conjure political authority through the inventive, dangerous, and transgressive political personas known as "dashing ladies." Tarini Bedi develops a feminist theory of brokerage politics, arguing that political grids where women employ political, symbolic, and material resources through the political system may be seen as channels of what can be termed "political matronage."

This book sustains and expands the new mobilities paradigm by focusing such theoretical advances on South Asian scholarship. When it comes to analytical approaches to movement, the mobilities turn has been tremendously provocative, particularly in the last twenty years. However, much of that literature remains rooted in the priorities, ontologies, and geographies of the West/Global North. This volume extends earlier approaches by centering South Asia as a critical site through which scholars can advance new empirical research, develop fresh theoretical tools, diversify mobilities studies, and pose a challenge to predominant models. Through a diverse set of interdisciplinary chapters, South Asia on the Move makes a sustained argument about the value of decentering (im)mobilities research. In so doing, the collection redirects the regional, theoretical, and methodological foci of the mobilities turn, demonstrating the relevance of South Asia for thinking about varieties of movement within the region and around the world.