Decolonizing on Notice: Returning Pensions to Colonial Paupers

The largest flows of capital in our times are through pension funds, whether they are local or global, as sources of credit, debt and investment, and which also provide the fiscal technologies invested in welfare states.
In this talk, Professor Geeta Patel will go back to one genesis of the pension funds with which we are familiar. This is an Indian past, a period when in the late 1700s, British colonial employees in India were reduced to bankruptcy and vagrancy at the end of their service. The employees threatened to steal from the East India Company if they were not permitted to start a pension fund; after protracted negotiations, the company acquiesced. Yet eighty years later, overcoming many perils, an Indian soldier in the colonial army walked to Kolkata disguised as a fakir to ask for his arrears in salary and pensions, and he was denied.
In this discussion Professor Patel will explore an ecology, one set in South Asia, the British colonial setting of pensions and social security, one that is rarely recognized as an important and complex source of their modern counterparts. Not only did British approaches to pensions and social security rely on Indian conceptions. Not only did pension funds become central to underwriting the fiscal company state. Not only did pension funds produce other credit debt circuits at the time. At the same time, pensionary promises made and disavowed assumed other valences under the East India Company’s rhetoric of welfare for its subjects, a raison d’être simultaneously subverted by a systematic policy of extraction. This constitutive contradiction, between care and ruin, holds invaluable keys to what is occurring today across the world, as more and more people are struggling to resolve the tensions between what their pensions mean to them and to the organizations that fund or provide them. What other ways of thinking or being are enabled through this constitutive contradiction?  What unexpected ramifications or effects do we notice when we follow what happens through fiscal technologies?

Bio

Geeta Patel is a professor at the University of Virginia. Her first book Lyrical Movements, Historical Hauntings explores the queer semiotics of Urdu modernism through the lyric, biography and historical conditions of production of the poet Miraji. Her next, Risky Bodies &Techno-intimacy brings haphazard science to media, aesthetics, sexuality, finance. She translates voraciously from a roster of languages, writes poetry and has co-edited three journals. Her on-going ventures include: bacteria and genocide, pensions and poetics, physics and literary prose, nationalism and promissory notes.

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Refreshments will be provided.