Banking on Uncertainty: Debt, Default, and Violence in Indian-Administered Kashmir

Abstract

This dissertation examines the everyday life of banking and finance in the politically volatile and disputed Himalayan region of the Kashmir Valley, the site of a more than 30-year-long insurgency against the Indian state. Based on 22 months of ethnographic and archival research conducted at a large bank in the capital city of Srinagar, the dissertation tracks the technical and routine work of bank staff and loan officers as they labored amidst continuous strikes, curfews, and protests. It also examines the strategies employed by loan borrowers and guarantors as they negotiated debt repayment. Drawing on the anthropology of banking and finance, theories of violence and sovereignty, and the study of risk, the dissertation considers how finance and banking is made possible amidst the chronic political uncertainty in Kashmir. In probing this ethnographic site, the dissertation offers several analytics—from spatio-temporal jurisdictions to volatility—to better understand finance, violence, and movements for self-determination.