Paper short abstract:

I show how the fiscal flows of the 'millennial city' of Gurgaon, India, manifest as a gendered substance of kinship tied to gendered roles, obligations, and relations. I analyze women's intimate speculations about money and kinship, amidst the broader speculative urbanism of the city.

Paper long abstract:

Gurgaon, India has seen spectacular urbanisation in the last two decades, with private capital transforming the city from an agrarian hinterland to India’s ‘millennial city’. This has meant a massive influx of money and people, and the creation of new avenues of work, consumerism, and leisure. Money is present in its seeming abundance in the city, part of its ‘urban metabolic rift'. At the same time, it remains elusive and mercurial in that it is hard to acquire and fast finishing for most. While the urban economy has been variously studied with attention to its ever-expanding capitalistic frontiers of investment, employment and spending, I trace how the fiscal flows of the city manifest within the home as a deeply gendered substance of kinship tied to gendered roles, obligations, and relations. Taking the family as my starting point -- with its structural constraints, affective entanglements and relations of interdependence -- I study how the fiscal flows, mis-flows and un-flows of wage, rent, financial assets, income, savings or expenditures become crucial plot points around which 'family dramas' congeal, animating familial anxieties, ambitions and attachments, and oftentimes reorganizing the family structures and gender roles. Following the lives of four women living at the margins of the city, I trace how they engage in intimate speculations about money and kinship futures dependent on the flows and blockages of money in the home amidst the larger speculative urbanism of Gurgaon, to renegotiate belonging within the home.