Tanushree Kaushal delivered a lecture on ‘Alchemy of Capital: The Creation of Financial Value from Social, Political and Moral Lives’. It was chaired by Prathama Banerjee.
ZOOM ID: 87196246448 PASSCODE: csdsdelhi
This talk explores how financial value is generated not merely through markets or production, but through the social, political, and moral lives of low-income women in rural India. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork (2021–2024) with microfinance borrowers in West Bengal including participant observation during loan collection and everyday economic practices, I develop the concept of vernacular critique to theorise how women interpret, contest, and reshape dominant financial logics from the ground up.
Positioned as ideal subjects of financial inclusion, women in the Global South are often portrayed as passive recipients or victims of debt. In contrast, I foreground their critical and ambiguous engagements with finance by looking at how they navigate, appropriate, and resist its norms in ways that expose the embedded hierarchies of gender, kinship, and value.
Their experiences reveal how financial value is created through social reproduction, moral obligations, and community ties, realms that are typically excluded from economic theory.
By bridging feminist political economy, anthropology, and critical finance studies, this talk calls for advancing theory from the South and demonstrates how experiential knowledge challenges the Eurocentric canon. Alchemy of Capital thus asks: what happens when we take subaltern epistemologies seriously as sites of economic theory-making?
Tanushree Kaushal is a political economist and anthropologist whose work bridges feminist political economy, international relations, and the anthropology of finance. She recently completed her PhD at the Geneva Graduate Institute, where her dissertation Social Finance in India: Coloniality, Gender, and Labour was funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation.
Her research traces the production of financial value across the social finance chain, from international investors to women borrowers in rural India, highlighting the gendered and affective labour that underpins finance. Drawing on extensive fieldwork in West Bengal and policy institutions in New Delhi and Geneva, her work centres experiential and subaltern epistemologies as critical to theorising contemporary capitalism.
Tanushree’s recent publications include articles in Economy and Society, Globalizations, New Political Economy and Finance and Society, exploring financial inclusion, regulatory politics, and the everyday practices of intermediaries and borrowers. Her current project develops the concept of vernacular critique to examine how low-income women in India interpret and contest financial concepts such as credit, risk, and value.
She has taught graduate courses in political economy and race at the Geneva Graduate Institute and the University of Bern and worked with organisations such as the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom and advised institutions on gender, governance and financial inclusion including UN Working Group on Discrimination Against Women and Girls and the World Economic Forum. Her research has been funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation, Hans Wilsdorf Foundation, NORRAG Global Education Centre.
Prathama Banerjee is Professor at Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi.
Friday, 22 August 2025, 4 pm, Seminar Room and Zoom https://bit.ly/3U8WWTV
