This article examines the micropolitics of state-directed women’s collectives in India called self-help groups. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in a setting where development becomes a means of counterinsurgency for the state, it looks at how rural women in the eastern Indian state of West Bengal use these collectives to negotiate with the state and make claims on state actors. The article argues that rural women aspire to new individual selves through their membership of SHG collectives. Women reimagined their selfhoods through their access to the state-sponsored public sphere and building new roles for themselves within it. The argument is presented in conversation with research on self-help groups and microfinance initiatives for rural women, and it builds on work that examines the unintended consequences of such development interventions for women’s lives.
BanerjeeM. (2010). Leadership and political work. In PriceP., & RuudA. E. (Eds.), Power and influence in India: Bosses, lords and captains (pp. 20–43). Routledge.
2.
BasuI. (2011). Security and development—Are they two sides of the same coin? Investigating India’s two-pronged policy towards left wing extremism. Contemporary South Asia, 19(4), 373–393.
3.
BhanM. (2014). Counterinsurgency, democracy and the politics of identity in India: From warfare to welfare?Routledge.
4.
BrownW. (1995). Finding the man in the state. In States of inquiry: Power and freedom in late modernity (pp. 166–196). Princeton University Press.
5.
BurawoyM. (1998). The extended case method. Sociological Theory, 16(1), 4–33.
6.
ChandhokeN. (2003). Governance and the pluralisation of the state: Implications for democratic citizenship. Economic and Political Weekly, 38(28), 2957–2968.
7.
ChandhokeN. (2005). Seeing the state in India. Economic and Political Weekly ( special issue (march)), 1033–1039.
8.
ChandraU., & MajumderA. (2013). Introduction. Selves and society in postcolonial India. South Asia Multidisciplinary Academic Journal [Online] 7. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/samaj/3631
9.
CorbridgeS., WilliamsG., SrivastavaM., & VeronR. (2005). Seeing the state. Cambridge University Press.
10.
CruikshankB. (1996). Revolutions within: Self-government and self-esteem. In BarryA., OsborneT., & RoseN. (Eds.), Foucault and political reason: Liberalism, neo-liberalism, and rationalities of government (pp. 231–252). University of Chicago Press.
11.
CruikshankB. (1999). The will to empower: Democratic citizens and other subjects. Cornell University Press.
12.
DasV. (2008). Violence, gender and subjectivity. Annual Review of Anthropology, 37 (October), 283–299.
13.
DuttK.-L., & SamantaG. (2006). Constructing social capital: Self-help groups and rural women’s development in India. Geographical Research, 44(3), 285–295.
14.
FergusonJ. (2013). Declarations of dependence: Labour, personhood, and welfare in southern Africa. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 19, 223–242.
15.
FergusonJ. (2015). Give a man a fish: Reflections on the new politics of distribution. Duke University Press.
16.
FernandezB. (2008). (En)gendering poverty policy in India: Towards a new feminist theoretical framework (D.Phil. thesis). University of Oxford, Oxford, UK.
17.
FullerC. J., & HarrissJ. (2001). For an anthropology of the modern Indian state. In FullerC. J., & BeneiV. (Eds.), The everyday state and society in modern India (pp. 1–30). Social Science Press.
18.
GuptaA., & SivaramakrishnanK. (2011). Introduction: The state in India after liberalization. In GuptaA., & SivaramakrishnanK. (Eds.) The state in India after liberalization: Interdisciplinary perspectives (pp. 1–28). Routledge.
19.
JakimowT. (2014). Sightings of the state, reflections of self as citizen: Self-becoming in development encounters. European Journal of Development Research, 26, 905–921.
20.
JakimowT. (2015). Decentring development: Understanding change in Agrarian societies. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
21.
KalpanaK. (2017). Women, microfinance and the state in neo-liberal India. Routledge.
22.
KamraL. (2019). The expanded state in contemporary India: Counterinsurgency and the prime minister’s rural development fellowship. Contemporary South Asia, 27(1), 1–14.
23.
KarimL. (2011). Microfinance and its discontents: Women in debt in Bangladesh. University of Minnesota Press.
24.
KohliA. (1987). The state and poverty in India. The politics of reform. Cambridge University Press.
25.
LeveL. (2007). ‘Failed development’ and rural revolution in Nepal: Rethinking subaltern consciousness and women’s empowerment. Anthropological Quarterly, 80(1), 127–172.
26.
LietenG. K. (1992). Continuity and change in rural West Bengal. SAGE Publications.
27.
MallickR. (1993). Development policy of a communist government: West Bengal since 1977. Cambridge University Press.
28.
MinesM. (1994). Public faces, private lives: Community and individuality in South India. University of California Press.
29.
MolyneuxM. (2008). The ‘neoliberal turn’ and the new social policy in Latin America: How neoliberal, how new?Development and Change, 39(5), 775–797.
30.
MoodieM. (2008). Enter microcredit: A new culture of women’s empowerment in Rajasthan?American Ethnologist, 35(3), 454–465.
31.
MosseD. (2005). Cultivating development: An ethnography of aid policy and practice. Pluto Press.
32.
OngA. (1996). Cultural citizenship as subject-making: Immigrants negotiate racial and cultural boundaries in the United States. Current Anthropology, 37(5), 737–762.
33.
PandianA., & AliD. (Eds.). (2010). Ethical life in South Asia. University of Indiana Press.
34.
PattendenJ. (2010). A neoliberalisation of civil society? Self-help groups and the labouring class poor in rural South India. Journal of Peasant Studies, 37(3), 485–512.
35.
PomaA., & GravanteT. (2017). Protest, emotion and change: An analysis of two women’s collectives fighting against machismo in Oaxaca, Mexico. Interface, 9(1), 204–229.
36.
RoyS. (2019). Precarity, aspiration and neoliberal development: Women empowerment workers in West Bengal. Contributions to Indian Sociology, 53(3), 392–421.
37.
SanyalP. (2014). Credit to capabilities: A sociological study of microcredit groups in India. Cambridge University Press.
38.
SenD. (2018). Everyday sustainability: Gender justice and fair trade tea in Darjeeling. Women Unlimited.
39.
SenD., & MajumderS. (2015). Narratives of risk and poor rural women’s (dis)-engagements with microcredit-based development in Eastern India. Critique of Anthropology, 35(2), 121–141.
40.
SivaramkrishnanK. (2000). Crafting the public sphere in the forests of West Bengal: Democracy, development, and political action. American Ethnologist, 27(2), 431–461.
41.
SivaramakrishnanK., & AgrawalA. (2003). Introduction: Regional modernities in stories and practices of development. In SivaramakrishnanK., & AgrawalA. (Eds.), Regional modernities: The cultural politics of development in India. Oxford University Press.
42.
SharmaA. (2008). Logics of empowerment: development, gender, and governance in neoliberal India. University of Minnesota Press.
43.
StadlenL. (2019). Being seen: Bureaucratic entanglements & gendered politics. Presentation at the Sussex Asia Centre, 20 March 2019.
44.
SudN. (2013). Local agency and structural continuity: Views from an SHG-based microcredit scheme in Western India. European Journal of Development Research, 25, 271–287.
45.
SundarN. (2012). Winning hearts and minds: Emotional wars and the construction of difference. Third World Quarterly, 33(44), 701–717.
46.
RajanR. S. (2003). The scandal of the state: Women, law, and citizenship in postcolonial India. Duke University Press.
47.
RankinK. N. (2002). Social capital, microfinance, and the politics of development. Journal of Feminist Economics, 8(1), 1–24.
48.
RoyI. (2013). Development as dignity: Dissensus, equality and contentious politics in Bihar, India. Oxford Development Studies, 41(4), 517–536.
49.
VindhyaU., & LingamL. (2019). Social action committees: Community intervention to reduce gender-based violence. Indian Journal of Gender Studies, 26(3), 263–287.
50.
WoodE. J. (2008). The social processes of civil war: The wartime transformation of social networks. Annual Review of Political Science, 11, 539–561.
