Women, Gender and Everyday Social Transformation in India

263 Pages·2014·2.463 MB·English

by  Kenneth Bo Nielsen, Anne Waldrop

Women, Gender and Everyday
Social Transformation in India
Anthem South Asian Studies
The celebrated Anthem South Asian Studies series continues
to lead the field with first rate studies on history, sociology, anthropology and
economics. The series addresses academic and professional audiences, and confronts
issues of colonialism and postcolonialism, economic development, and the religious
and political dynamics of the region. Titles in the series have earned an excellent
reputation for the originality of their scholarship and
their high production values.
Our editorial advisors include Anthony P. D’Costa,
Nandini Gooptu, Christophe Jaffrelot, David Ludden, Patrick Olivelle,
Raka Ray, Tirthankar Roy, Romila Thapar and John Zavos.
Women, Gender and Everyday
Social Transformation in India
Edited by
Kenneth Bo Nielsen and Anne Waldrop
Anthem Press
An imprint of Wimbledon Publishing Company
www.anthempress.com
This edition first published in UK and USA 2014
by ANTHEM PRESS
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or PO Box 9779, London SW19 7ZG, UK
and
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© 2014 Kenneth Bo Nielsen and Anne Waldrop editorial matter and selection;
individual chapters © individual contributors
The moral right of the authors has been asserted.
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above,
no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into
a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means
(electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise),
without the prior written permission of both the copyright
owner and the above publisher of this book.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record for this book has been requested.
ISBN-13: 978 1 78308 269 8 (Hbk)
ISBN-10: 1 78308 269 0 (Hbk)
Cover image courtesy of Dagrun Kyte Gjøstein.
This title is also available as an ebook.
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments vii
Women and Gender in a Changing India 1
Kenneth Bo Nielsen and Anne Waldrop
PART I WORK, TECHNOLOGY, ASPIRATIONS
Chapter One Today’s ‘Good Girl’: The Women behind India’s
BPO Industry 21
Reena Patel
Chapter Two Gender, Intersectionality and Smartphones in
Rural West Bengal 33
Sirpa Tenhunen
Chapter Three The Introduction of Electricity in the Sundarban Islands:
Conserving or Transforming Gender Relations? 47
Tanja Winther
Chapter Four Changing Consumption and the Negotiation of
Gender Roles in Kerala 63
Harold Wilhite
Chapter Five Gender, Work and Social Change: Return
Migration to Kerala 75
Berit Helene Vandsemb
Chapter Six Showtime and Exposures in New India:
The Revelations of Lucky Farmhouse 89
Nicol Foulkes and Stig Toft Madsen
PART II DEMOCRACY AND THE DEVELOPMENTAL STATE
Chapter Seven Gender and Democratization: The Politics of
Two Female Grassroots Activists in New Delhi 105
Stein Sundstøl Eriksen and Anne Waldrop
vi WOMEN, GENDER AND EvERYDAY SOCIAL TRANSFORMATION
Chapter Eight The Reproductive Body and the State: Engaging
with the National Rural Health Mission in Tribal Odisha 123
Arima Mishra and Sidsel Roalkvam
Chapter Nine A veiled Change Agent: The ‘Accredited Social
Health Activist’ in Rural Rajasthan 139
Dagrun Kyte Gjøstein
Chapter Ten Disciplining Gender and Gendering Discipline:
Women’s Studies in Contemporary India 157
Mallarika Sinha Roy
PART III ASSERTIONS AND ACTIVISM
Chapter Eleven New Subalterns? Feminist Activism in an Era
of Neoliberal Development 175
Srila Roy
Chapter Twelve Family, Femininity, Feminism: ‘Structures of Feeling’
in the Articulation of Men’s Rights 189
Romit Chowdhury
Chapter Thirteen Women’s Activism in the Singur Movement, West Bengal 203
Kenneth Bo Nielsen
Chapter Fourteen The Women’s Question and Indian Maoism 219
Lipika Kamra
Chapter Fifteen Caste and Class in Gendered Religion: Dalit Women
in Chennai’s Slums 235
Karin Kapadia
About the Editors and Contributors 251
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The editors would like to thank the Norwegian Forum for Development Research
(NFU) for opening the doors of its 2012 annual conference in Oslo to our workshop on
‘Transforming Gender in Contemporary India’, where the idea for this volume was first
aired. We are grateful to the participants at the workshop for their valuable contributions
and input. While many of the chapters in this book were drafted for the NFU workshop,
some authors joined the process in its later phases. We are grateful for their efforts, which
have enabled us to secure a wider regional coverage. Special thanks are due to Pamela
Price for moderating and stimulating the discussion at the workshop over two days in late
November. We also wish to express our gratitude to the Centre for Development and
the Environment (SUM) at the University of Oslo, Norway, and to Oslo and Akershus
University College, Norway, for the financial support extended to the project. Lastly, we
thank Tej P. S. Sood, Rob Reddick and Brian Stone at Anthem Press for their efficiency
and kind encouragement along the way.

WOMEN AND GENDER IN
A CHANGING INDIA
Kenneth Bo Nielsen and Anne Waldrop
The pace of socioeconomic transformation in India over the past two and a half decades
has been formidable. In this volume we are concerned with examining how these
transformations have played out at the level of everyday life to influence the lives of
Indian women, and gender relations more broadly. The 15 chapters in Women, Gender and
Everyday Social Transformation in India conceive of these ongoing everyday transformatory
churnings as undercurrents that play out well below the radar screen of the national and
international media, and beyond the realm of the spectacular. To analyse these everyday
transformatory churnings our authors look closely and ethnographically at a diversity of
everyday ‘sites of change’ (Rao et al. 1996) in which macrostructural processes of social
transformation interface with everyday lifeworlds to generate new contestations and
contradictions that impinge directly on the everyday lives of ordinary Indian women, and
on the relations between genders. In doing so, they combine to identify the ambiguous,
contradictory and contested coexistence of discrepant gendered norms, values and visions
in a society caught up in wider processes of social transformation. They also provide us
with some cause for cautious optimism. Thus, while much of the current debate on
women and social change in India is, for very good reasons, dominated by the pessimism
triggered by the apparent increase in brutal sexualized violence against women, and the
very low child sex ratio that makes India ‘a terrible place for girls’ (Reddy 2012; see also
Jha et al. 2006; John 2011), the chapters in Women, Gender and Everyday Social Transformation
in India paint a more composite and contradictory picture. The past 10 to 20 years have
seen an increasing number of women moving out of the domestic domain and into
the ‘public’ domains of education, work and politics (Reddy 2012); female literacy has
gone up; more women pursue higher education and are an increasingly common sight
on buses, in cafes, markets and other public spaces in the big cities; new and affordable
communication technologies blur the gendered boundaries between the private and the
public; there is greater participation of women in economic activity in the cities; the
large number of women elected to village and municipal councils across the country give
women a permanent political voice; there is a strong women’s movement; and in some
states women now ‘outvote’ the men. These changes, we argue in this book, are deeply
implicated in everyday lives and have had a considerable, if contradictory, impact on
how Indian women and men live, work and dream.