Interview by Nell Whittaker
Portrait by Sohrab Golsorkhi-Ainslie

NW What is “tension”, and why do the Gaddi use the English word, not its Hindi or Gaddi translation?

NKS Initially, I turned up in a village and conducted a household survey, which included a classic mental health questionnaire called the PHQ-9. I added a few questions around caste, wealth, class and how people care for each other. It flopped so badly. Sitting someone down and asking them intimate questions felt strange. Often, we would begin with the survey, but then we would move into normal conversations and at that point, people really wanted to talk about their tensions. These were whatever was worrying them or burdening their households – someone’s mother-in-law having an operation, or someone not having enough money to send their child to school. Someone’s husband had an accident, so he had to come back from his job in Delhi, and then he was at home drinking. This is a community who have moved from speaking Gaddi dialect to Hindi, so most of our conversations were in Hindi. There is no word for tension in Gaddi: it is a new word that entered Hindi parlance in the last few decades amidst broader cultural and economic shifts to wage labour, sedentarisation, urban living, sending kids to school, and getting private medical insurance. Its usage also points towards the status anxieties that came with being on the cusp of the middle class, and the precariousness of these lives. Gaddi people are not poor – labourers from central India work on their construction sites, because the Gaddi don’t want to take those jobs. It was more about the fantasy of belonging to the emergent middle class, a new national kind of imaginary, and the everyday barriers that sublimated this fantasy.

NW So tension comes from their existence being increasingly bureaucratised?

NKS I think the word emerged more through processes of commercialisation rather than bureaucratisation. Some think that the word tension first entered Hindi parlance via signs warning people not to touch high-tension wires, when electricity became part of the national state infrastructure in the early 20th century. The term also has a genealogy rooted in medicalised mental illness. It was first articulated in France in the 18th century as a form of anhedonia or pathological distress, and it seeped into South Asian psychiatric diagnostics as well. One of my interviewees described it as a fog, something physical and mobile, which really fits South Asian models of embodiment, where illness moves across bodily boundaries. Western medical literature often describes individual bodies and determinants of illness, whereas this model is far more permeable. For example, the gaze of someone who is jealous can produce an illness, or a conflict can produce a tension that creates somatic effects. These examples illustrate how Gaddi people theorise the ways in which positive or negative feelings move between the external and internal body, to produce wellbeing or illness.

NW How does tension relate to preexisting South Asian theories concerning what you call “biomoral” substances, like blood, semen and sweat, and their relationship to health?

NKS Particularly with caste-based South Asian models of health, bodies contain substances which are encoded by their caste positionality. This is why a lot of caste discrimination happens through the restriction of water or food sharing, because the pollution of a lower caste body – that comes from the work they do – is seen to produce ill health in a pure body. The classic case are Dalit leather workers, who deal with polluting substances and who are therefore seen as polluted themselves. It is not that different to how bodily wellbeing is unevenly distributed across class and race here in the UK, but discrimination across society is far more explicit in the caste system. People explicitly avoid certain people who live in low-caste neighbourhoods; a lot of my upper-caste interlocutors wouldn’t come to my house when I lived in the village. Once you become attuned to the fluctuations of life in India, you realise caste matters just as much as it ever has done. There are parallels with the UK, a society which is sometimes described as “post-racial”, but where race matters in every interaction.

NW In the book, you write about the difficulty of extracting or “scaling up” these specific conceptual exchanges into a wider context, to form broader conclusions about race, modernity and health. How did you handle that problem?

NKS I suppose that is the puzzle I have dealt with for the last ten years since I wrote my thesis. Much early medical literature understood this use of tension as a simple translation of a condition such as depression or anxiety. In the book, I try to give a detailed rendering of how this particular model of tension was articulated in this world and moment. Early on in my research, a social psychologist said to me that we should develop a psychological scale for measuring tension across India, integrating the experiences of these communities into a story about the nation. I realised that this was the exact opposite of what I was trying to do, because I was trying to tell a specific geographical story about tension and distress. I invite lots of different studies about how people theorise social change, discrimination, distress and domesticity through their bodies. This approach stands in contrast to the idea of tension as a universal theory.

NW You quote Frantz Fanon, who writes about tension in the colonised subject as also being a readiness for resistance. What does resistance mean in the context that you were in?

NKS A lot of the strongest forms of oppression that women experience were from their mother-in-laws or their mothers, and anthropology can bring that micropolitics to life. Oppression doesn’t only work in one register, so it’s helpful to consider resistance when looking at how people express tension through the body. They might not be able to resist with a capital “R”, but there are oblique ways in which people resist, by opening spaces or renegotiating relationships, or even through registering bodily ailments – complaints, feelings, accusations. I don’t think that’s straightforward resistance, agency or oppression; I think it’s a relational form of negotiation. You have simple forms of resistance, like women becoming possessed and speaking to their husbands sexually, or having dreams that allow them to talk about their desires and libidinal selves. These are oblique ways in which people negotiate the circumstances they find themselves in. .