Philippa Williams Queen Mary University, London
Author of Everyday Peace Politics, Citizenship and Muslim Lives in India
‘Everyday Peace?’ came out in 2015. Its objective was to intervene in grand narratives of war and conflict with a more mundane yet complex picture of ‘everyday peace’. Drawing on research which began in 2005 under the supervision of Bhaskar Vira, the book counters romanticised notions of peace as disembodied and detached and grounds the process and politics of peace through the everyday lives of ‘Muslim weavers’ and ‘Hindu traders’ in Varanasi, north India.
Reflecting on the book’s journey is a pleasure six years later, especially because at the time of publication I had just given birth to my youngest son, was on parental leave, and the idea or possibility of a ‘book tour’ was not on the cards. Aside from the baby, I was nervous about how good, or not, the book was. The conceptual focus on ‘peace’ developed during my postdoctoral fellowship in the Centre of South Asian Studies, Cambridge and through conversations and collaboration with Fiona McConnell and Nick Megoran on Geographies of Peace.
With a first full draft on my laptop, I prepared a proposal for Neil Coe, then editor, who quickly responded with interest but recommended that ‘you could develop the geographical components of your argument more forcefully’ and position the book more explicitly within political geography. I duly responded and the proposal subsequently went out for wider review. Three to four months later Neil wrote to say tantalisingly that ‘we may possibly like to offer you a contract’ but I needed to address the reviewers' and editors’ many questions.
My 9,000-word commentary response was a turning point for the book. It helped to crystallise the concept of ‘everyday peace', expand on its theoretical underpinnings and defend my inclusion of the title’s provocative ‘?’. I am indebted to those early readers who invested so much intellectual energy into imagining a clearer, more ambitious, book than I could have done alone. With the contract later signed, I reworked the manuscript every Friday over two to three months and slowly and steadily a stronger manuscript took shape, and after further valuable editorial input from Neil, it finally reached publication.
Soon after the book came out Dave Featherstone, the incoming editor, kindly nominated it for the 2016 Julian Minghi Distinguished Book Award by the AAG Political Geography Speciality Group. It was a real boost when the book went on to win the award. By now though my attention had shifted away from ‘peace’; I wasn’t sure what else I had to say after the book and was more focused on experiences of ‘the state’, 'citizenship' and ‘working lives’. Moreover, the demands of a new lectureship were intense, and with my research based in India, two small children and a partner working night shifts in the NHS I was conflicted over whether periods of research in India would even be possible. When still finalising ‘Everyday Peace?’ soon after my first son was born, I had managed a two-week trip to New Delhi, later publishing some of this research on Muslim middle-class professionals with colleagues. It felt selfish and exhilarating leaving an eight month-old baby behind with a latticework of childcare filled by grandparents and my partner, emotions echoed by Katy Jenkins in her brilliant piece on academic motherhood and fieldwork. Enjoying the buzz of empirical research again, and running out of funding, motivated me to apply for both independent and collaborative grants, some orientated towards London and some to India, but none were successful.
By 2017 I had my first sabbatical and after a few months drafting a piece on the Indian diaspora and overseas citizenship, the kids went off to my parents in the Easter holidays and I returned to Varanasi; excited see old friends and share my book, particularly with Pinku, my research assistant and research participants. I had heard much about how Varanasi had changed and wanted to see for myself. In 2014 Narendra Modi was elected Prime Minister and the Hindu right Bharatiya Janata Party were in power. Varanasi had been selected as Modi’s parliamentary constituency and was being materially and symbolically transformed into the ideal platform for realising India’s (Hindu) future, which I later wrote about.
In this context Muslim friends were much more fearful of their public safety and the sense that the government would protect India’s ‘secular’ society was shattered. It was also apparent that digital technology was transforming everyday lives in this regional city; digital payment apps were being pushed in the aftermath of demonetisation and WhatsApp was connecting people digitally, virtually for free. In the aftermath of an attack on a young Muslim man by members of the Hindu Yuva Vahini, news circulated quickly on WhatsApp which brought crowds to the police station calling for justice. While police administrations across India were struggling to regulate new digital spaces, Varanasi’s police threatened to charge the WhatsApp group Admin for ‘inciting religious violence’, rather than arrest the perpetrators of street violence. WhatsApp would later be used for circulating misinformation, raising fascinating questions about the relationship between government, technology and everyday politics and society.
Over the next year Kavita Datta and I developed a research grant and publication on digital financial payments in Indian small towns. Although neither successfully converted into tangible or ‘REF-able’ outputs, that period was instrumental in sparking my interest and understanding on the lived politics of digital technology. It was around then that one of my PhD students, Kavita Dattani, pointed out an advert for research grants from WhatsApp.
Curious about the WhatsApp advert, I approached Lipika Kamra with a draft application and to my delight she agreed to partner on the project. To our surprise the application - which took a fraction of the time and bureaucracy needed to draft an ESRC bid - won the funding and a trip to Menlo Park, California. We quickly set up a team of researchers and met in an Airbnb in Delhi for a few days to eat, talk and plan.
The research was based in Varanasi and New Delhi and examined how WhatsApp was mediating everyday political life which we capture in an article in press on kinship, democracy and the ‘digital living room’ and the thorny issue of big tech funding and critical scholarship. Future publications will explore storytelling, surveillance and the feminist geopolitics of digital privacy. While WhatsApp has re-rooted my research in/to Varanasi, I have also collaborated with others in thinking about work beyond the wage and am now excited to revisit questions of ‘everyday peace’ with academic and civil society partners based in Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu and West Bengal. This time our research is in the context of intimate household violence in India, in part, inspired by Katherine Brickell’s mobilisation of mine, and others’ work on ‘peace’. Seeing how ‘Everyday Peace?’ has been implemented (and critiqued) by peers has been a real pleasure, not least where it has generated new connections and conversations.
Indeed, publishing a monograph with RGS-IBG Wiley Blackwell has been one of the most rewarding experiences of my academic life; it has underpinned other research awards and cultivated a keenness to write further research monographs. With any luck, the next will be co-authored, and on the politics of WhatsApp in India. Meanwhile, the coronavirus pandemic means research meetings in India happen remotely via Zoom, and suddenly, holding down a lectureship, enjoying family life and pursuing research in India seem, almost, compatible.