Sites of Affection: Delhi, Youth and Communal Difference
This research explores how socially engaged, creative methodologies can be used as a framework for challenging communal difference. In urban Delhi, where Hindu nationalism has shaped everyday life and politicised relationships between Hindus and Muslims (Pai and Kumar, 2018), young people are constantly negotiating intimacy and religious boundaries. My project asks how these negotiations can be understood and reimagined through collaborative, creative practices.
The research will use participatory methods such as filmmaking, workshops, and sound recording. These activities build relationships, create trust, and enable young people to reflect on their sensory experiences of communalism and express their emotions, thoughts, and interactions through embodied forms. By focusing on soundscapes, visuals, and material markers in Delhi, the study will examine how these environments create feelings of inclusion or exclusion, while also opening space to imagine alternatives.
This project highlights how joy, friendship, and everyday intimacies emerge through collaboration, and how these can become tools for contesting communal divisions. By placing creative, participatory methods at the centre, the research contributes both to anthropological debates on everyday communalism and to practical, community-led approaches that address religious and ethnic segregation in India and beyond.