Embodied labor, life, and pain of female chikankari kaarigars in Lucknow, India

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dc.contributor.advisorHindman, Heather
dc.contributor.committeeMemberHyder, Syed Akbar
dc.contributor.committeeMemberRudrappa, Sharmila
dc.contributor.committeeMemberShingavi, Snehal
dc.contributor.committeeMemberWilkinson, Clare
dc.creatorGiles, Charlotte Helen Graziani
dc.creator.orcid0000-0002-3920-1075
dc.date.accessioned2021-10-15T18:41:54Z
dc.date.available2021-10-15T18:41:54Z
dc.date.created2021-08
dc.date.issued2021-07-23
dc.date.submittedAugust 2021
dc.date.updated2021-10-15T18:41:55Z
dc.description.abstractBodies, pain, and the labor of chikankari embroidery are central to this dissertation. My attention begins with the hands, and other limbs and body parts that move and pain in the process of work. I focus on a group of Sunni Muslim women who worked together at Khala’s chikankari embroidery Center. The first two months of my chikankari education left me with notebooks filled primarily with comments about my own bodily discomfort, complaints of pain by others, and descriptions of new stitches learned. Sitting in the Center, our bodies and the physicality of embroidery labor occupied much of the conversation and our wordless gestures. My attention to the bodies of kaarigars is an attention to how women move, how they feel and sense pain due to the labors they undertake, how they process and describe those pains through a particular vocabulary, and then how they manage them. I begin by investigating the way women move and travel throughout Khadra, their neighborhood in Lucknow. Women engage in a series of “tactical cuts” such as “gali cuts” to ensure their mobility within and beyond their mohalla. I then move closer to home, specifically to the home known as the Center where embroidery work takes place and the ladies experience and describe their embodied labor through a pain vocabulary. Women must often hold onto their own pain as well as that of others, an intersubjective act of emotional care labor, in suspension within themselves, leading to the painful and distressful feeling of “tenshan”. Lastly, I move to the intersubjective relations built between the ladies as they give testimonies of their pain to the others who act as witnesses. To engage in these moments is to manage one’s pain and to enable others to manage their own. The moments and events portrayed in this dissertation occurred at a certain time in India, under a right-wing Hindutva regime engaged in Islamophobic rhetoric and violence. The imprints of this violence are scattered throughout and foreground my interactions with the predominately Muslim population of artisans.
dc.description.departmentAsian Studies
dc.format.mimetypeapplication/pdf
dc.identifier.urihttps://hdl.handle.net/2152/89196
dc.subjectIndia
dc.subjectEmbroidery
dc.subjectChikan
dc.subjectGender
dc.subjectLabor
dc.subjectPain
dc.subjectBodies
dc.titleEmbodied labor, life, and pain of female chikankari kaarigars in Lucknow, India
dc.typeThesis
dc.type.materialtext
thesis.degree.departmentAsian Studies
thesis.degree.disciplineAsian Cultures and Languages
thesis.degree.grantorThe University of Texas at Austin
thesis.degree.levelDoctoral
thesis.degree.nameDoctor of Philosophy

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