Urban Aspirations and Transcendental moorings: Ethnography of Associational Life in Mumbai's Urban Peripheries

<strong>Centre for the Study of Social Systems School of Social Sciences </strong> Seminar Notice <strong>Dr. Shireen Mirza</strong> (Indian Institute of Technology-Madras) a talk on <strong>Urban Aspirations and Transcendental moorings: Ethnography of Associational Life in Mumbai's Urban Peripheries</strong> Date : <strong>February 12, 2015 </strong> <strong>Abstract: </strong>Thepaperseeks to explore"collective maps of striving"inethnographic narratives of urban placemaking in Mumbai 'slums'. The different imaginations and politics of placemaking come to fore, when migrant groups in Mumbai's peripheries reclaimmarshy wet landsused to grow egg-plantor baiganon the Thane creek by firming the watery landwith waste, cement and sand. These settlements exist in a continuum with the city's waste—garbage, excreta, scrap, outside the sanctioned ciruits of production, labour and land-titles. Legal exclusion,here, is negotiated and strived to be transcended by forging distinct relationships between urban form andassociational life seen in numerousmosque committees, anjumans, welfare societies, mandal and budh vihar committees.This paper is an ethnography of horizons that migrant communities to Mumbai city imagine, in striving to legitimize their lifeworlds in space. It explores the workings of mosque, dargha, temple committees and party associationsoperating in the reclaimed resettlements.These associationsseek to intervene in the everyday invarying ways, including by invokingthe potential in saints to alter circumstances, following reformist Islamic discourses of moral self-betterment, avowingtransformative politics of leaders like Ambedkar as messianic figures, as well as organizing election campaigns and rallies for political partiesin calculative strategies of aspiration. The ethnography of community associations explored in the paper, then is a self-presentation of associational life told in transcendental cosmologies. This, as the paper argues,rests on transterritorial networks of charity capital,iterant saints, and "political universals of dehumanization and stigma" that combine a prehistory of hope with the politics of policy, prudence and pragmatism. <strong>Bio-Data:</strong> Shireen Mirza works as an Assistant Professor of Sociology and Anthropology at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at the Indian Institute of Technology-Madras. Her Ph. D thesis in anthropology and sociology, at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) was a historical ethnography of the old city of Hyderabad. In it, she explored the presence of a precolonial past in the affective energies and temporal rhythms expressed in present-day renditions of Muslim belonging to the old city, through remembrances of nostalgia, tragic decay and Muslim decline. After completing her Ph. D she did her post-doctoral work as part of the Tata Institute of Social Sciences-Max Planck Institute for the Study of Ethnic and Cultural Diversity 'Urban Aspirations' project. She is currently working on her bookUrban aspirations of labour groups in Mumbai slums, facilitated through a fellowship fromMax Planck Institute for the Study of Ethnic and Cultural Diversity.