Slowness and Speed in Young Pahari (of the highlands) People's Senses of Spatialized Belonging: Space/Place, Belonging and (im)Mobilities

Based on empirical data collected over a period of eight months in the Himalayan state of Uttarakhand and in the lowlands of the Delhi region in India, my presentation examines the fluid material-social geographies of pahari (of the highlands) youth’s gendered experiences of belonging. My analysis draws on qualitative data from more than 100 research encounters. These include mobile ethnographic encounters, interviews, group discussions, observations at cultural events, and weeklong immersions into young people’s everyday lives. In this paper, I explore young pahari people’s lived experience of the rhythms of everyday life in the different, but increasingly blurring boundaries of the Uttarakhand highlands and the neighbouring urban lowlands. Young pahari people’s belonging is felt through a spatialized dynamic of slowness-tranquillity (but harshness) of the highlands, and the speed-stress (but possibilities) of the lowlands. Young pahari people embody the experience of sukoon (tranquillity) and openness of the mountains, and on the contrary the stress and cramped-ness of the urban plains. For young women, however, the slowness-sukoon and open-ness of the highlands is also paradoxically an embodied experience of socially imposed (im)mobilities, and strenuous labour roles. The pahar too is a heterogenous socio-spatiality, with varying degrees of remoteness, and rhythms of life. The urban and rural pahar are lived as distinct spaces/places representing different gendered lived realities. Technologies of mobility - physical, informational, perceptual - enabled by a complex rhizome of infrastructural spaces, government social policies and neoliberal values are manifest in places that were even until recent times ‘remote’. This also includes the virtual immersion of young people into global social media. This is why globally connected technologies of mobility take on a distinct significance amongst pahari youth cultures for they symbolize a new gendered mobility-identity complex.