Samprati Pani is a social anthropologist working at the intersection of urban studies, the anthropology of markets, and the philosophy of process. Her PhD thesis titled ‘The Making of Weekly Bazaars of Delhi’ examined the conditions of making and unmaking, dynamism and disruption of neighbourhood bazaars in Delhi through the relationality of practices of diverse bazaar actors. She is the co-founder and editor of the blog Chiragh Dilli, which explores forms of writing the city. Her writings on the blog explore everyday modes of walking, street life, and the ordinary city.
Areas of Research Interest
- Marketplace socialities
- Ordinary consumption
- Shop signage and design
- Urban spatial formations
- Walking as a research technique
Ongoing Research Project
Repair Work and Maintenance: Techniques, Materiality and Sociality of Urban Marketplace Infrastructures
The project is part of the research focus area ‘Economy and Knowledge’ of the Max Weber Forum for South Asian Studies (MWF). It looks at repair and maintenance in Delhi’s markets across three registers: First, at the level of individuals and households, it uses repair as a critical lens to extend the conceptualization of consumption from an act of using up objects to one of making things last. Second, as a practice, it looks at the activities, labour, skills, affective and bodily investments, and subjectivities involved in repair and maintenance. Finally, it extends the understanding of repair from ‘fixing the broken’ to practices of improvising objects of everyday use, including spaces such as streets and marketplaces.Arguing that repair and maintenance cannot be simply located at particular moments in economic cycles but rather are entangled with everyday life, the project is aimed at understanding how repair shapes the social infrastructure of the city.
Publications
Pani, Samprati. 2021. ‘Corona Diaries’, in Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi and Rachel Lee (eds), Of Migration, https://www.cca.qc.ca/en/articles/issues/30/of-migration/81820/corona-diaries, 12 October.
Pani, Samprati. 2021. ‘Jamnapaar’, Motherland: Report Volume 2 Yamuna, https://www.motherlandmagazine.com/yamuna/jamnapaar/, May.
Pani, Samprati. 2021. ‘Navigating the City: Rituals, Routines and Relationships in the Making of Delhi’s Ordinary Streets’, Astragalo, 27: 117-134. https://dx.doi.org/10.12795/astragalo.2020.i27.09
Pani, Samprati. 2020. ‘Of Basti and Bazaar: Place-Making and Women’s Lives in Nizamuddin, Delhi’, in Hilal Alkan and Nazan Maksudyan (eds), Urban Neighbourhood Formations: Boundaries, Narrations and Intimacies, pp. 52-71. Routledge: London and New York.
Pani, Samprati and Zaidi, Sarovar. 2020. ‘If on a winter’s night, azadi…’, in Seema Mustafa (ed.), Shaheen Bagh and the Idea of India: Writings on a Movement for Justice, Liberty and Equality, pp. 88-102, Speaking Tiger: New Delhi.
Pani, Samprati and Sarover Zaidi. 2019. ‘Et tu, Brutalism: Of Anxious Rooms and Modernist Architecture’, Domus, 8(9): 52–61.
Pani, Samprati. 2019. ‘Something for Everyone: An Illustrated Story on Weekly Bazaars’, in Jamie Harrison and Hema Ramanathan (eds), Weavers: Weaving magic through language, pp. 55–64. Indiannica Learning: New Delhi.