India – Ethnographic Marginalia

The Horse Between Worlds: Notes from a South Delhi Enclave

Over many weekends, the same ritual unfolded each afternoon. A white horse appeared at almost the same hour, completed its slow round of a South Delhi enclave and disappeared once more beneath the trees. At first, the spectacle seemed scarcely worthy of notice. Still, its recurrence drew attention to what the noise of the metropolis so often conceals. Along a single stretch of road, social worlds that customarily remain apart briefly converged – a child’s leisure, an attendant’s daily labour, contemporary anxieties of affluent parenting and older inheritances of social mobility and class distinction. What began as an unremarkable routine of the block became a way of understanding how urban childhood is imagined, organised and lived, without ever stepping beyond the horse’s familiar circuit.

Messy Methods: Ethnography Under Structural Violence

27 March 2026 Priyanjali Mitra I initially intended to study the working lives of migrant workers in a city I grew up in and thought I knew. What I was not prepared for was how consistently those conversations kept turning toward fear, precarity, everyday violence as one register of a much larger, layered order of…

(Un)knowing the Sea

17 August 2025 Indu Poornima I thought I knew the sea … The sea disciplines itself into a rhythmic tranquillity, insisting that I let go of the unforgiving cacophony in my head. Occasionally, it would send lost belongings, floating on its waters, for me to find. I kept some — they claimed space in the…

Of Marital Rape, or “What do they do when they can’t find a body?”

11 October 2024 Urmi Bhattacheryya What follows is a piece of fiction, written for a PhD-level seminar called “Feminist Media Studies” at the University of Colorado, Boulder, instructed by Dr Michela Ardizzoni. However, what it also is, is a pastiche of life experiences and voices that have been articulated to me, over and over again,…

‘Bearing Witness’ in the Field

28 August 2024 Shahdab Perumal The sun is merciless in April. I mostly stay at home and spend time with my mother Salma. In some ways, the privilege of doing fieldwork in my village is that it blurs the distinction between home and field. My conversation with my mother blurs that distinction further. Our conversations…

Fielding the Familiar: Reflections on Researching the Hometown

What “degrees of familiarity” can expand or limit fieldwork for an ethnographer based in the Global South? Or to put it more simply, who can afford to be familiar or distant?

Ethnographic Marginalia

Tag: India