Wind Masculinities: Extractive, Caste, and Nationalist Rule in Rural India

ABSTRACT This paper shows how India's wind electricity regime does not simply decarbonize electricity; it reorganizes power through a distinctive wind masculinity—a caste‐coded, infrastructural mode of rule that keeps money, machines, and people moving. It extends the notions of petro‐/solar masculinities to a South Asian scholarship on caste, Hindu nationalism, and rural patriarchy. Drawing on 7 months of multi‐sited ethnography in Kutch, Gujarat, the paper traces how wind's dispersed materialities elevate men who can convert engineering expertise, upper caste authority, party ties, and police access into uninterrupted logistical flows. Three empirical strands anchor the argument: (1) wind masculinities are extractive, where site‐making and engineers domesticate land and schedules; (2) they are caste‐coded masculinities, where dominant caste brokers perform the “dirty business” of energy politics; (3) Hindu nationalist masculinities take shape in border wind corridors, where saffron symbols and discretionary gaze mark Muslim villages as suspect spaces to penetrate, surveil, and reclaim.