UC Irvine

This project examines how digitally enabled financial infrastructures like banks and ATMs – and their failure to deliver the promise of access, inclusion, and efficiency – have been received, reworked, and resisted by people in Manipur, India. While long hours of waiting to access money from banks and ATMs are a common phenomenon in most non-metropolitan parts of India, the situation in Manipur is exacerbated by prolonged effects of militarization, insurgency, and inter-ethnic strife. Even in urban areas like the capital city of Imphal, banking services are frequently disrupted by faltering electricity and internet connections. Many ATMs, moreover, are replenished with cash only once a day for “fear of insurgents making off with the money.” Banking in such a context behooves a flexible disposition and resolve to manage time, money, and work schedules. And the task of withdrawing cash is transformed into “ATM work,” that involves scouting the cityscape for a functional machine, delegating the task to others, or preparing to face it before sunrise; the long queues in front of banks and ATMs foster lighthearted banter on the state of affairs and apathy of the state. On occasions, they stand in for long-delayed catch-ups between friends. My research tracks how people creatively fashion financial discipline and mobilize traditional conventions of barter and reciprocity to organize community-based support systems and financial arrangements that help them save and insure against economic contingencies and infrastructural breakdowns. I suggest these practices are not just adaptive responses to state neglect and infrastructural deficit, but also an indictment of technocratic fixes that ignore the lived realities and requirements of those they are meant to include. Of the four main chapters, the first provides the context of fieldwork and guiding questions. The second taps into the sociality and conversations in the long queues in front of banks and ATMs. The third examines a financial arrangement called marup practiced by members of the Meitei ethnic community in Imphal. The fourth and final traces the changing stakes in marup arrangements by drawing from court cases and disputes over money.