VIRTUAL CSSA: Of Matchbooks and Gold Jewellery

Mythri Jegathesan
Object: Matchbook

This talk is about an election campaign matchbook that a Tamil tea estate woman worker gave me ahead of Sri Lanka’s August 2015 Parliamentary Elections. I take this matchbook as an entry point to “watch” (Campt 2017) how a sensorium of plantation paternalisms nests in the materialities of Sri Lanka’s South-Central tea plantations. From generations of Indo-Lankan diplomatic encounters to ongoing struggles for labor justice, I consider how objects in Sri Lanka’s Hill Country such as this matchbook contain but also displace known histories of  workers’ struggles and demands for dignity. By presenting the paternalisms that nest in these objects, I ask how, if at all, watching them more closely might open us up to envisioning a politics of potentiality on Sri Lanka’s plantations.

Chinar Shah
Object: Gold Jewellery

Through a photographic practice, Shah engages in questions of ownership and divestment of gold jewellery at the intersections of gendered financial inclusion policies, patriarchal social norms of inheritance and female debt by looking at a few case studies from rural Tamil Nadu. Gold as an object chronicles memory of financial situations of a household in ownership and in loss. It is also an object of aspirations, desires and financial empowerment for women who bear a huge burden of debt without having any claim to other forms of assets. Through photographic explorations, Shah attempts to tell a complex tale of debt, micro credit and gold in rural India.

Part of the Objects Across Borders series, bringing together scholars and creative practitioners working in and on South Asia to reflect on the stories embedded in visual and material artefacts. This series is organised by Vindhya Buthpitiya (UCL) and Mallika Leuzinger (Princeton) and hosted by the UCL Centre for the Study of South Asia and the Indian Ocean World, and The Fung Global Fellows Program and Program in South Asian Studies at Princeton University.