Please join us on Thursday, Feb 26 for a talk by Dr. Ekta Chauan, Assistant Professor at Jindal School of Art and Architecture at O.P. Jindal University.

The event is co-hosted by the Department of Sociology & Anthropology and the Centre for Studies in Gender and Sexuality.

Time: Thursday, February 27, 1.30 PM

Location: AC-02-LR-107

Zoom link for hybrid participation: 

https://zoom.us/j/91971366010?pwd=PVsTeT5htzWs9p0ucA0wTT3CCDrWIo.1 

Abstract

This talk is a journey through the villages at Delhi’s edge, where the city does not simply arrive but collides with existing rural worlds. Drawing from my book Sheher Mein Gaon and long-term fieldwork in Sonipat, Haryana, I reflect on what happens when urban expansion is layered onto agrarian life rather than replacing it. Sonipat’s transformation into an “education city” reveals how villages are pushed to the margins of development even as they are enveloped by it, producing new hierarchies between locals and newcomers.

Through everyday stories—of local women navigating intensified surveillance and restricted mobility, of young students from outside negotiating visibility, desire, and vulnerability, and of families responding to rapid change by tightening control over land and lineage—I explore how rural–urban interaction becomes deeply gendered. As campuses, gated housing, and new economies emerge, older patriarchal hierarchies do not disappear; they adapt, harden, and sometimes reassert themselve. The talk also turns to emerging practices of ancestor memorialisation, where personalised statues appear in village commons as attempts to anchor memory and identity amid rapid change. Together, these sites show urbanisation not as progress alone, but as an uneven, intimate, and deeply social process unfolding at the city’s fringes.