Navjit Kaur

NAVJIT KAUR, then a graduate student at Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey, was approved funding in October 2021 to aid research on “Refusal to bank: Futures of Subaltern Finance in Post-colonial Punjab, India,” supervised by Dr. Julia Elyachar, At a moment when work’s capacity to underpin social organization seems to be waning in the post-industrial capitalist order, this dissertation situates its inquiry in the peripheries of post-colonial India, challenging this hasty demise of work. Through 26 months of participant observation conducted in Malerkotla, Indian Punjab, this dissertation traverses the forms, futures, and valuations of work the gendered subaltern — the invisibilized yet pivotal figure of labor today — performs, spread as they are across agricultural fields, artisanal markets, household and sexual economies. The grantee argues that gendered biographies of work from the periphery of global capital reconfigure work away from a singular calculus of utility and market logic. Interspersed with Islamic categories, caste hierarchies, NGOs-driven entrepreneurial logic, and changing relationships with stagnating agricultural landscapes, the endurance, exhaustion, and valuation of work from these margins highlight the struggles within and against work. This dissertation, therefore, interrupts the homogeneity of a singular global capital logic that tethers work and its ideals to a universalizing Protestantism. In foregrounding the experiences of “Muslim working women” often occluded from the anthropology of Islam and anthropology of work, this research challenges the singular lens of anti-Muslim majoritarian violence that underscores the biography of Muslims in India,