In this talk, India China Institute’s Postdoctoral Fellow Sarandha Jain will discuss her PhD dissertation, which studies the oil-mediated relationship between the Indian state and citizens. Focusing on both oil production and consumption, presenting ethnography of oil refineries, research institutes, state offices, a peri-urban working-class-neighborhood near Delhi, and ‘black markets’, her talk examines oil as an infrastructure for the state and for society. She argues that the Indian state distributes itself into citizens’ lives via petroleum products, which obtain their sociopolitical agencies while being produced in certain ways, and play out those agencies while being consumed in certain ways. Her ethnography of refineries details out the microprocesses of oil refining and the complex relationship that human and nonhuman actors share. It elaborates on how politics get programmed into petroleum products, designed to discipline consumer-citizens into particular lifestyles, and how varying actors encumber this. Research on oil consumption with ‘black-marketeers’ and ordinary consumers of petroleum products, probes “distorted discipline”, where governmental plans get mangled by the informal practices of state actors as well as citizens. How does the politics programmed into petroleum products in refineries actually play out once other actors intervene, and snatch control over oil away from the state? Investigating this tussle between legalized and illegalized groups, she describes how it structures citizens’ lives, and the constellations of power and forms of sociality it gives rise to. This talk highlights the constant churning between the state and citizens through ever-evolving devices of government, as well as through escape from them. Specific modes of subjectification, engineered through flows of oil, lie at the heart of this churning, over which state-citizen formations are negotiated.

Sarandha Jain
Postdoctoral Fellow
INDIA CHINA INSTITUTE

Sarandha Jain is a socio-cultural and political anthropologist, who recently completed her Ph.D. at Columbia University. Studying the multi-nodal network of petroleum manufacturing, circulation, and use in India, her research examines petroleum as an infrastructure for the Indian state and society. To understand the politics of petroleum in the everyday, she studies the modes of government, forms of sociality, and constellations of power petroleum produces and is produced by, both in its manufacturing and its use.

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Discussant

Rohan D’Souza
Professor
Graduate School of Asian and African Area Studies
KYOTO UNIVERSITY

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