Nishita Trisal

Banking on Uncertainty: Debt and Interdependence in Kashmir examines the daily life of banking and finance in Indian-Administered Kashmir, the politically volatile and disputed Himalayan region over which India and Pakistan have fought three wars. Scholarly and public understanding of Kashmir has largely focused on its disputed status or on the repressive effects of militarization on the region’s residents. Banking on Uncertainty, in contrast, attends to how institutions and the individuals entangled with them manage the disruptions and volatility that mark daily life in Kashmir. Drawing on 26 months of ethnographic and archival research conducted at a prominent semi-state bank, my book project investigates how conditions of violence and instability shape the procedures and politics of granting loans and recovering debts. While there has been growing anthropological interest in the study of money, finance, and debt, we still know relatively little about how formal financial transactions unfold (and break down) in spaces of political upheaval. Banking on Uncertainty argues that the bank is a decisive location from which to grasp the dynamics of the dispute between Kashmir and India and an equally significant space from which to theorize anew the contemporary transformations occurring within the realms of banking and finance.