My anthropological research focuses on reproductive health care and marriage reconfigurations related to the shortage of women in North India.
In my doctoral thesis, I explain why reproductive health is a growing concern in India. In addition to high maternal and infant mortality rates - which the central government has been actively trying to curb since 2005 - India is confronted with significant population growth, a political instrumentalisation of the differences between Hindu and Muslim fertility rates, and a problem of unbalanced infant sex ratio (919 girls per 1000 boys) that persists despite legislation banning female selective abortion. Based on an investigation of nearly a year and a half in a public obstetric hospital and three slums of Jaipur (Rajasthan), I show that decisions concerning reproductive health are the result of multiple recommendations made by individual aspirations, family resolutions, medical recommendations, and national norms that are often divergent and difficult to reconcile. Thanks to the support of three thesis prizes (La Chancellerie de Paris, AMADES, GIS Asie), this research resulted in a book entitled Du bidonville à l'hôpital. Nouveaux enjeux de la maternité au Rajasthan (From the slum to the hospital: new issues in maternity in Rajasthan), published by Éditions de la FMSH in 2019. This book shows how health programmes that are supposed to guarantee free access to obstetric care reinforce existing stereotypes and, paradoxically, tend to make the most vulnerable beneficiaries more aware of socio-economic inequalities.
In the same year, I broadened the focus by coordinating with Bertrand Lefebvre and Fabien Provost a special issue of the Purushartha collection on hospitals in South Asia.
During a double post-doctorate at the University of Zurich (first in the Department of Anthropology with Johannes Quack, then as part of a Swiss National Science Foundation project at the Institute of Asian and Oriental Studies with Nicolas Martin), I became interested in one of the main consequences of the imbalance in the sex ratio: the difficulty for men to find wives in some rural areas of northern India. The aim of this new research was twofold: to understand how the experience of forced celibacy was experienced locally and to understand the extent to which the scarcity of wives caused men and their families to reconsider the usual norms of mate choice in terms of social class, caste, and religious affiliation.
Recruited as a CNRS research fellow in January 2021, I now aim to explore how the Jats, a powerful landowning caste often referred to as 'dominant,' respond to the social (rise of lower castes, urbanisation), economic (agricultural crisis, neo-liberal reforms) and demographic (high sex ratio imbalance) challenges that threaten their place in the local caste and class hierarchies of Indian Punjab.
