Department of School of Social Sciences invites Prof. Harish Naraindas, Centre for the Study of Social Systems (CSSS), Jawaharlal Nehru University to deliver a talk on "Disasters, Pro Tem Development and 'Hafta' Democracy".

Abstract:
Post-disaster reconstruction appears to be an exemplary version of ‘slum development’ that is compressed in terms of time and expanded by way of resources. The index of this is the slogan build back better. It implies that communities affected by a disaster are a dilapidated lot a priori, and disasters like the tsunami are a great cleansing: one that offers aid agencies a clean slate and an opportunity to transform a blighted existence into a civilised one. Each of them arrives not only with a heraldic logo but with their own plans to build back better. The result is a plethora of architectural styles and ownership patterns leading to difference, hierarchy and heart-burn between victims; a realigning of relations between victims and non-victims, where the victims, in a climate of sudden and large influx of money and material goods, go from being victims to villains; and, finally, this sudden influx, by understandably addressing shelter under the sign of disaster-proof build back better, often leaves the crucial – and expensive – infrastructure of power, water and sanitation to local governments, whose inability or unwillingness to address them transforms these reconstructions into a classic form of pro tem development, with the missing pieces of the puzzle, especially water and sewage, inexorably converting them into veritable slums.

Such pro tem development is ripe for the exercise of what I have christened as hafta democracy, where the victims are made to bear the burden of living in unsanitary conditions by either paying exorbitant prices for the missing power and water, or by sourcing them illegally and paying ‘weekly protection money’ – hafta – to the slum lords and the police. The hafta in turn inserts them, as potential vote banks, into electoral cycles, where they become, for the political class and electoral democracy, pro tem citizens in waiting, with the redemptive promise of a patta – ‘title deed’ – to property on the outskirts of the city. This tantalizing promise, from an extractive and quotidian hafta to the redemptive patta, is the soteriology of third world democracies, whose destitute urban spaces appear to be vast post-disaster relief camps, where the legal and the illegal bleed into each other.

About the Speaker:
Harish Naraindas is currently Professor of Sociology at Jawaharlal Nehru University, and Honorary Professor at the Alfred Deakin Institute, Faculty of Arts and Education, Deakin University. He was adjunct faculty at the University of Iowa (2004-19); visiting professor at the department of sociology, University of Freiburg (2009); joint-appointments professor of the Cluster of Excellence, South Asia Institute (SAI), University of Heidelberg (2008-12); and DAAD visiting professor at the SAI, University of Heidelberg, in 2017. He works on the history and sociology of science and medicine and has published on a range of topics, including an epistemological history of tropical medicine, a comparative history of smallpox from the 18th-20th century, on the creolisation of contemporary Ayurveda, on spa medicine in Germany, on pregnancy and childbirth within the context of competing medical epistemes, and recently on how anthropology attempts to explain the non-human. He is currently working on AyurGenomics and P4 medicine; past-life aetiologies and therapeutic trance in German psychosomatic medicine; a multi-sited study of perinatal loss and bereavement in the Anglophone world; and a comparative study of alternative medicine and well-being in India and Switzerland. Among his recent publications are a co-edited special issue of Anthropology and Medicine called ‘The fragile medical: the slippery terrain between medicine, anthropology and societies’ (2017), and two co-edited books: Healing holidays: itinerant patients, therapeutic locales and the quest for health (London: Routledge, 2015), and Asymmetrical conversations: contestations, circumventions and the blurring of therapeutic boundaries (New York: Berghahn, 2014).