Sarandha Jain

Sarandha Jain studies the multi-nodal network of petroleum manufacturing, circulation, and use in India, examining petroleum as an infrastructure for the Indian state and society. To understand the politics of petroleum in the everyday, she studies the modes of government, forms of sociality, and constellations of power that petroleum produces and is produced by, both in its manufacturing and its use. Focusing on the oil-mediated relationship between the Indian state and citizens, Jain investigates how oil becomes government but also escapes government. She explores how the Indian state distributes itself into citizens’ lives via petroleum products, and then what makes petroleum products leak out of the logics of government and capital, be apprehended in unintended ways, and foster alternate networks of power. Jain is now working on a book project, Fluvial Government: Tracking Petroleum as Liquid Infrastructure in India.

Her previous work was on rivers, riverine communities, and the Indian state (In Search of Yamuna: Reflections on a River Lost (2011)). At large, she is interested in unravelling structures of power, how they are contested in diverse settings, and how this negotiation plays out over the bodies of fluvial substances (rivers, petroleum) that get mired in struggles and negotiations, owing to the affordances they harbor. To this end, she conceptualized and organized a series of speaker dialogues titled “Flows, Infrastructure, Citizenship in India and China” at the India-China Institute, The New School in 2023.

Jain has also organised conference panels on topics investigating the ethnography of regulation, oil and political subjectivity; and has presented on topics exploring the materiality of oil as a political invention, state-citizen relations as determined by oil, oil as an infrastructure, the cultures of Yamuna River, at institutions including New York University (US), Graduate Institute (Switzerland), University of Wisconsin-Madison (US), American Anthropological Association (US), and ‘Petrocultures 2018’ (UK). Jain’s professional work experience includes working with nonprofits and grassroots communities in India.

Selected Publications

(Under Review). “Manufacturing Politics in Oil Refineries: The Invented Ontology of Oil”. American Ethnologist.

(In preparation). “Peopled Infrastructure and Outlaw Sovereignty: Navigating Illegality and Bureaucracy in Cooking Gas Cylinders”. American Ethnologist.

2022. “From Battlefields to Homes: Oil’s Imperial and Quotidian Life in Colonised and Independent India”. In Suvobrata Sarkar (ed.), History of Science, Technology, Environment, and Medicine in India, 157-172. New York: Routledge.

2021. “A Wealth of Information in a Novel Narrative”. Review of Living with Oil and Coal: Resource Politics and Militarization in Northeast India, University of Washington Press, by Dolly Kikon. In Ecology, Economy and Society–the INSEE Journal, 4 (1): 139–143.

2020. “Analysing an ‘Accident’: Extra-Terrestriality in the Oil Industry”. PangSau. June 21st. (Published with pseudonym ‘Nargis Kumar’)

2020. “Building ‘Oil’ in British India: A Category, an Infrastructure”, Journal of Energy History/Revue d'Histoire de l'Énergie [Online], n°3, March 30th.

2015. “Oil and the Everyday in Colonial and Independent India (1880–1975)”. Perspectives in Indian Development, Nehru Memorial Museum and Library Occasional Paper, New Series #61.

2011. “In Search of Yamuna: Reflections on a River Lost”. New Delhi: Vitasta Publishing.