UC San Diego

Ashrey is a village in North India that is made up of one tribal community that was once nomadic, racialized, and criminalized under British rule, but has been reclassified as a Scheduled Caste (also sometimes known as “untouchable”) and permanently settled in this village since the 1970s. Ashrey has since become what some scholars term a “prostitution village,” a place where the majority of families derive most of their income from sex work. Commercial sexual labor is highly contested in Ashrey, and has been officially banned by the community's extra-judicial council. Despite their directive, sex work continues as an open secret. While it might seem like politics in Ashrey could align with several salient political frameworks in North India, including development and indigenous rights, I did not find that politics took these forms in this community. Instead, political life in Ashrey is a question of who and what is “good.” This dissertation looks at the good first in its historical context as the community came to be categorized by various governance regimes. I then detail the ways in which sex work is contested and debated as a potential site of the good, followed by how an NGO intervention has disrupted its use in the community. I end with two cases in the local village council, where goodness is evaluated through the public performance of dispute resolution. Ashrey, I argue, is a community perpetually enmeshed in hyper-moralized discourses of not only sex work, but race, gender, tribe, caste, class. As a result, politics have become an ethical enterprise motivated by a collective investment in the good. This finding is significant because it implies that what some anthropologists call “the good'' can be a site not just of morality or ethics, but also of political power.