Copyright by Shubhra Sharma 2005

Shubhra Sharma

2005

The Dissertation Committee for Shubhra Sharma certifies that this is the approved version of the following dissertation:

Empowering Women or Institutionalizing Women’s Agency: An Ethnography of the

Mahila Samakhaya Education Program for Women in India

Committee:

______Kamala Visweswaran, Supervisor

______Charles Hale

______Kamran Asdar Ali

______Syed Akbar Hyder

______Norma Moruzzi

Empowering Women or Institutionalizing Women’s Agency: An Ethnography of the

Mahila Samakhaya Education Program for Women in India

Shubhra Sharma, B.A., M.PHIL.

Dissertation

Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of

The University of Texas at Austin

In Partial Fulfillment

Of the Requirements

For the Degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

The University of Texas of Austin

December 2005

For

Arti ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The research for this project was made possible by the International Education

Fee Scholarship, offered by the University of Texas at Austin. I was able to spend two years in Delhi and Banda district (Uttar-Pradesh), conducting interviews with women associated with the program.

I would like to thank everyone at Nirantar, Center for Women and Education,

Delhi, for providing me unlimited access to their archives and sharing their most current work in the field of education. I thank each member for their love and generosity each time I was in Delhi.

I owe another round of gratitude to all the women in Karwi, Chitrakoot. They always made me feel as if I never left and that the city was indeed a home. I hope I have represented you accurately in these pages for all the women who come after you. To the people in Jaipur and Delhi, I am thankful for their time. This project has been made richer by their insights on the program and the changing face of policy process in India since the

1980s. I thank my committee members for reading innumerable drafts of this lengthy manuscript. Their critiques saved this project from being only a memoir.

In 1996, my mother had stood at the departure gates of Indira Gandhi

International Airport, Delhi, and bid me goodbye without a tear. She knows that she is the only reason for me to have persevered in a new country. This success I owe to her in a large measure. Another measure is attributed to my brothers—for packing my bags for me and sending me off to neverland. They know that finishing this project is my revenge!

I, however, dedicate this manuscript to Arti. My mind denies that she is gone but, to me, that means she still lives and especially in the pages of this dissertation.

v Empowering Women or Institutionalizing Women’s Agency: An Ethnography of

the Mahila Samakhaya Education Program for Women in India

Publication No.______

Shubhra Sharma, Ph.D.

The University of Texas at Austin, 2005

Supervisor: Kamala Visweswaran

The central argument of this dissertation is that programs of empowerment or those that seek to foster women’s agency infact pose problems for it in and through their institutionalization. It selects a government sponsored education program for women in

India (Mahila Samakhaya) to produce a critical ethnography of its institutionalization and of its effects on women’s agency in Banda district of Uttar-Pradesh. Institutionalization of a program here refers to institutionalization of education in the rural context of Banda.

The process involves two stages: recruiting local women as functionaries/ agents and creating frameworks/ institutions for education through the assistance of such functionaries. Experiences and articulations around empowerment are therefore relative to the levels of responsibilities vis-à-vis the program’s institutionalization at the grassroots. Infact institutionalization complicated women’s experience of empowerment.

Even as the process fostered women’s individual agency in similar/ different ways, the rules of structuring/ structured interventions subverted the formation of a women’s collective. This weakened women’s bargaining power in matters regarding their agency.

Dissent and self-reflection were penalized elsewhere in districts where the program continued to function after 2001. This ethnography then raises concerns around feminist

vi theory and praxis. If institutionalization is inevitable under conditions of globalization, then it is imperative to rethink and reconstruct feminist spaces for critical reflection

regarding governance, development, and women’s agency in the same context. The

survival of the “ultra-poor” is contingent upon the responsiveness of policy to their

changing lived realities/ needs within its actualized framework, than upon its theoretical

sensibilities.

vii CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION 1

CHAPTER 1 “EDUCATION FOR WOMEN’S EQUALITY AND EMPOWERMENT”: THE MAHILA SAMAKHAYA PROGRAM 29

CHAPTER 2 INTRODUCTION TO CHITRAKOOT: SITE OF STUDY 52

CHAPTER 3 INSTITUTIONALIZING EDUCATION/TEACHING A CURRICULUM: THE SAHELIS’ EXPERIENCES 73

CHAPTER 4 INSTITUTIONALIZING EDUCATION/FORMING VILLAGE-LEVEL COLLECTIVES: THE SAHYOGINIS’ EXPERIENCES 103

CHAPTER 5 INSTITUTIONALIZING EDUCATION/IMPLEMENTING A POLICY: THE COORDINATORS’ EXPERIENCES 137

CHAPTER 6 INSTITUTIONALIZING EDUCATION AND MAKING/ WRITING POLICY: THE BUREAUCRAT, THE THEORETICIAN, AND THE ACADEMIC-CONSULTANT 177

CONCLUSION 227

BIBLIOGRAPHY 238

VITA 258

viii

INTRODUCTION

This dissertation argues that programs of empowerment, or those that seek to foster women’s agency, pose problems for such agency in and through their institutionalization. This dissertation selects an educational program for women in India

(Mahila Samakhaya or MS) to produce a critical ethnography of the process of the program’s institutionalization and of its effects on women’s agency in the Banda district of Uttar-Pradesh.

MS was first instituted in the Banda district in 1989 as a pilot project. Banda is a region known for its anti-female bias and the lowest rates of literacy for women in the state and country (Sen and Dreze: 1997). The program claimed to produce a new kind of woman through a new kind of education—one who was empowered to question and change her lived realities from an informed position (Ramachandran: 1995). The government of Netherlands funded the project, but through the aegis of the government of India. Selected women’s groups and academics had the freedom to structure and implement the program with government support, but without bureaucratic intervention.

The resulting ethnography is concerned with the effects of institutionalized education on rural women’s agency in the Banda district of Uttar-Pradesh. Here institutionalization refers to constituting frameworks or structures, hiring agents, allocating resources, and building strategies for putting into place a formal system of dispensing education to local women in a context in which none existed. Within the context of MS, institutionalization specifically referred to creating a top-down management structure that included local women, using the movement approach to forge

women’s collectivities and, through it, to manufacture a demand for education, and then allocating resources for schools where such a demand could be met. The argument of this dissertation is that the drive towards institutionalization, instead of forging women’s agency, problematized it. If the premise of the program was that education is the means to an end, where the end is women’s collective and individual empowerment, then, in institutionalizing education, the premise was lost or even reversed, to the detriment of women’s agency.

Institutionalized education subverted women’s collective agency, while also circumscribing women’s individual agency. As frameworks became standardized, they became inflexible and less responsive to the women’s needs. Further, reflection and debate were not only discouraged, but also penalized. As such, debate and openness were deployed as a strategy to put frameworks into place, but not to enable them to evolve in keeping with the transforming needs of the context and the people within it. Managing people became more critical than granting people ownership of such processes. Making frameworks stable became more critical than evaluating how such a process forges (or does not forge) women’s agency.

Recent literature on institutionalization primarily focuses on non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and has been particularly critical of their management style and increasing dependency on international aid (Lewis: 2001, Kamat: 1999, Salmon and

Anheier: 1999). These factors, it is argued, also has distanced the NGOs from their social movement roots and recast them in the likes of the state, bureaucracies, and market- oriented institutions they had resisted. The literature focuses more on the evaluation of

institutions, as they exist and function, rather than on the process that constitutes them

(Lewis: 2000). Thus, to increase the effectiveness of NGOs, the literature suggests changes in management styles and increased people-level participation. As such, the literature recognizes that a drive to institutionalization has eroded movement-based approaches to development, yet fails to mount a fundamental critique of institutionalization itself in favor of such approaches.

This project is concerned with a particular process of institutionalization that was sponsored by the state at the local level and the problems that institutionalization posed for women’s agency therein. Through multi-level articulations of agents of the MS program, this ethnography foregrounds the real and potential effects of institutionalization on women’s agency.

In the context of MS, the process of institutionalizing education is comprised of two stages or components—recruiting local women as functionaries/agents and creating frameworks/institutions for education through the assistance of such functionaries.

Functionaries higher in the program hierarchy, such as the sahyoginis (supervisors), assisted in creating an environment conducive to educational interventions. Those at the lower levels, such as the sahelis (teachers), were directly involved with the structuring and formalizing of such applications. Both levels thus experienced and articulated empowerment relative to their levels of responsibility and work therein.

The sahyoginis’ articulations of empowerment were derived from their supervisory roles. Each sahyogini was responsible for ten villages. Their primary responsibility was to facilitate the development of sanghas or village level women’s

collectives. Holding informal discussions around village level issues such as water scarcity worked as a strategy to invite women out of their homes. A loose collective of

women was formed when they were routinely gathered for the purpose of discussion of a

variety of issues in the village. When the collective elected its own leader and began to

make informed choices in the interest of the collective and against social injustice, its

purpose was considered realized. In fostering women’s collective empowerment at the

village level, the sahyoginis experienced self-empowerment. They articulated their

empowerment as physical freedom to travel and perform their duties as sahyoginis. They

also articulated empowerment as a mental or emotional freedom to think critically and act

accordingly in favor of the self. In this regard, aatmsaath (self-identification) is valued

over samajh (understanding) and as the critical stage of self-empowerment.

However, a program that emphasizes collectivization as the only means for

women to transform institutionalized practices that disfavor them also subverts

collectivization in and through its own institutionalization. Agents of such

institutionalization, such as the sahyoginis, also found their collective agency subverted

in and through their participation in the process of institutionalization. They became

unable to deploy such agency in their own favor and against the bureaucratization of the

program, even while they could claim self-empowerment in relation to other social

institutions such as marriage and family.

The sahelis’ articulations of empowerment (or disempowerment) also were

relative to their experience within MS, particularly Mahila Shikshan Kendra (MSK), an

MS-affiliated school for women and girls in Karwi, a city in Banda. The sahelis were less

concerned with crafting an environment for education in the village than with structuring

a curriculum in a school-like setting in the city. Their self-empowerment was found in

their evolution as teachers. Initially, their limited informational skills made the sahelis

doubt their suitability as MSK teachers. However, through practice, the teachers gained confidence in their skills. They not only succeeded in formalizing a curriculum that was locally specific (in content and language), but also organized the material space within which the curriculum was transacted. Self-empowerment thus was found in producing

and transacting an experimental curriculum for rural women.

Self-empowerment also was projected in women’s lives outside of MSK, but in

ways dissimilar to the experience of the sahyoginis. MSK fostered women’s samajh, or

understanding of women’s issues, but samajh did not translate into aatmsaath or self-

identification. In their real lives, the sahelis rationalized violent husbands and bad

marriages. They serviced family debts and funded elaborate marriages of siblings. Unlike

the sahyoginis, whose empowerment was found in acting upon a critique of social

practice (a preference for singlehood over a violent marriage), the sahelis’ empowerment was principally found in their ability to earn a livelihood and, through it, maintain marital relationships, irrespective of their nature and quality.

Because their ability to earn was fostered by MSK, the sahelis’ articulations and experiences of empowerment or disempowerment were tied to the fate of MSK.

Bureaucratization of the program between 1999 and 2000 extended to MSK, and the focus within the program shifted from creativity to maintenance. No new thought or content was added to MSKs before the schools were closed down completely in 2001.

Sahelis’ protests against the closure of MSKs and concomitant suggestions for future changes in their management styles were ignored or rejected. The absence of a collective or even a workers’ union further diluted the sahelis’ bargaining power.

The program’s institutionalization also foregrounds the tensions between local level notions of empowerment and its elite level articulations. The elites or the program creators expected education, in its locally specific forms, to foster women’s collectivities at all levels of the program and not just at the village level. Such collectivities, it was expected, would craft a social change, while also empowering individual members as a result. Individual empowerment at the cost of collective empowerment was not, however, the elite-level expectation of the program.

Rather than suggest institutionalization of education at the local level as the

“problem,” however, the elites used institutionalization’s “effects” (the contradictory nature of local level experiences of empowerment) as their explanation for the failure of

MS Banda. Even as the elites critiqued institutionalized forms of education and bureaucratic forms of management, they verbalized no strategy to deal with their combined effect on MS. In fact, they transferred all responsibility for the success (or failure) of the program on its local representatives and, more specifically, local women.

They argued that the women used education for personal gains, rather than for a collective good. The elites argued that women’s experience of disempowerment was based in their inability to develop their collective identity.

It is at this point of the intersection between articulations of empowerment vis à vis the MS program for women that the question of ownership as a strategy for

governance is foregrounded. The strategy worked to recruit women within the program

and also for the program to develop its localized character. The actual control of the

program and its management, however, remained with the elites. They decided who

could or could not manage the program at the district level. Some sahyoginis were

promoted to the ranks of the coordinators later in the program, and sahelis were expected to run MSKs without any outside support or input. Promotion and increased responsibilities within the program, however, are not certain markers of its ownership by local women. This was made clearer when the sahelis could not stop the MSKs from closing. They claimed ownership over the institutions on the basis of their long-term association with them, but were denied such a claim. The MSKs closed, as did the program in 2001. Again, the program elites rationalized the program’s failure.

The program, according to the elites, had not been managed well over the years, and corruption became rampant at all levels of the program. Further, the MSKs had failed to further promote women’s collectives or collective agency. Therefore, the MSK’s were no longer useful or appropriate as per the mandate of the program. Such responses, when juxtaposed with the finite nature of the program’s time and funding, only served to legitimize the closure of the program in Banda. MS Banda became an example of mismanagement at local levels, and this served to bureaucratize the program at the state and national levels. Here, even the space to reflect on one’s experiences within the program was circumscribed. There were penalties instituted for any show of insubordination that included dissenting against higher management. Written/documented

histories of a constituting women’s agency, relative to specific interventions, were

allegedly burned for their uselessness to a reconstituting program at the state level.

In Lucknow, where the state office of MS is housed, self-reflective, collaborative

enterprises between program workers and academics, for the purpose of mapping the

personal journeys of the former, were rejected, with dire consequences for program

employees. Sangtin Yatra is a book that recounts the experiences of MS workers within

such an institutional setting.1 The authors belong to Sangtin, an NGO whose parent

organization is MS-Sitapur in Uttar-Pradesh (U.P.). The state office characterized the

book as disloyal to the program and, subsequently, the program director took punitive action against the authors and the workers of MS. Mobilization in support of the women has since led to the resignation of the director. However, the moment still raises questions about freedom for critical thought and action within institutionalized programs. This also contests the notion of ownership and democratic participation that the program was premised on and, instead, shows the problematic inevitability of the program’s institutionalization and control of such processes by the elites or government.

The sangtin issue in the context of the bureaucratization of the program also raises

questions about feminist theory and praxis. In its co-optation within a government

program and the program’s subsequent institutionalization, both concepts are

problematized. Collectivization as a strategy to enlist local women within the program

and to generate a demand for education locally facilitated institutionalization of education

therein. Institutionalization then fragmented women’s collective agency, even as it

fostered women’s individual agency. In the absence of a collective, individual women were unable to bargain in their own interest with the program managers at the district or state level. In fact, the eventual bureaucratization of the program subverted women’s individual agency. Dissent and self-reflection, vis à vis the program, were penalized.

Elite women, however, who instituted such a program, citing a theoretical and

empirical understanding of rural women’s particular condition of subordination, articulated no such empathy when the results of the program were not according to their expectations. The feminist empathy that was exhibited in creating a program was missing in the analysis of its effects. Elite women “blamed” local women for failing to create a local women’s movement through the many intellectual resources provided to them through the program. As such, the elites failed to take responsibility for their involvement in the bureaucratization of the program that subverted local women’s agency in different ways. They failed to step in on behalf of local women to initiate a dialogue with the government regarding the future of the program in Banda. Instead, they chose to critique bureaucratization as an inevitable process, even for programs such as MS.

However, if bureaucratization is inevitable and bureaucracies are geared towards maintenance rather than creativity in development, then why were simultaneous attempts made by feminist elites to convince the government to restructure an older government program in the new context? The MS Banda experience should have been the cautionary note against such restructuring. In 2002, a colloquium was organized by the Women’s

Studies Centre (WSC) at Jaipur, Rajasthan. The purpose of the colloquium was to discuss

1 See Sangtin Yatra: Saat Zindagiyon Mein Lipta Nari Vimarsh (A Journey of Sangtin: Feminist Thought

ways of restructuring the Women’s Development Program (WDP) that was instituted in

1983, but had been inoperational since 1991. WDP was considered by many to be the

precursor to MS. The purpose of both programs had been to foster women’s collectivity

through debate and discussion. Collectivity, it was argued, would empower women to

question and change institutionalized practices that had an anti-female bias. The only

difference was that MS had the mandate to provide educational inputs when

collectivization put forth such a need or demand, while WDP did not have the same

mandate.

Even as both programs were considered radical interventions in the history of

national development, their promise towards fostering women’s agency remained only

partially realized. In fact, women’s agency was problematized within both. A saathin or

village level worker’s quest for justice against her upper caste rapists remained a quest, at

best. The Hindu nationalist government protected its upper caste electoral constituency

by ensuring that its own program workers received no institutional justice. The program

thereafter became defunct. In MS, institutionalization of education posed problems for

women’s collective and individual agency. This history of the MS program was not

brought to the table in regard to WDP. Moreover, discussion around education was

dropped altogether, an observation that was not lost on some of the participants. Yet, no

one protested beyond articulating such an observation. Women’s groups pushed for a

commitment by the government to restructure WDP, even though no such commitment

Wrapped in Seven Lives), Sangtin, Sitapur, March 2004. 10

was forthcoming at the meeting. The government instead used the forum to present a new

scheme that focused on the health of mothers and their children.

The question that still remains is: Why did the elite level reject local level

manifestations of empowerment? Instead of critiquing institutionalization of education as a problem of empowerment, why did their critique focus on individualized expressions of empowerment/disempowerment? Why was it possible to participate in and organize a colloquium on restructuring an older government program in a new context, without referencing MS Banda and its educational interventions therein? It was “possible” because academics and policy theoreticians, in both organizing the program and later critiquing its effects, spoke from particular institutional locations. Perhaps their institutional affiliations, as college professors and NGO coordinators, served as the criterion for their employment. Additionally, a bureaucrat’s “illham” or inner revelation about who to recruit for the project of conceptualizing and writing a policy document only served to camouflage the reality.

Even as these recruits spoke on behalf of the women’s movement, theirs was a particular articulation of women’s condition and education as one suggestion for its reform that many others within the movement did not share. Some also cautioned against aligning with the government on such a project because bureaucratic styles of management have often subverted feminist agendas or projects. A policy to empower women through education, however, fit well a national agenda and its international origins. Therefore, the MS program was born through feminist support and input.

When the words of caution came true, however, and the program became bureaucratized, the elites dispersed their responsibility for engendering such a process through collaboration with the government. Ironically, the elite feminists expected women at the local levels to produce their own movement, despite institutionalization of a program, even as their own institutional locations remained unquestioned. More specifically, the elites expected that their critique of mainstream education, as limiting to women’s agency and on which the development of the policy and its implementation at the grassroots came to be premised, would produce an alternate education. This education, it was further argued, would then produce the desired social change for women.

Institutionalization of education within the program, however, produced a woman-identified space, but also a women’s school that approximated other mainstream schools. Thus, this women-identified space transformed neither the curriculum nor women’s agency in its collectivized form. The imperative of institutionalization then rendered mainstream the possibilities of a space and a curriculum for women. It also did not engender a collective initiative for a social and cultural overhaul in the local context or outside of the institutionalized space or school. In fact, institutionalization fragmented women’s collective agency at the grassroots. Instead of taking responsibility for the problems of institutionalization that fragmented women’s collective agency and in which the elites were implicated, the elites transferred the responsibility onto the local women.

They criticized the local women for their inability to apply their intellectual resources and collectiveness within the school towards real lives problems outside of it. In this way, the

elites protected their own institutional affiliations, but to the detriment of local women, whose lives were tied to the program in fundamental ways such as basic survival.

Thereafter, it also became easier for the elite women to shift institutional agendas as per the changing development paradigms. If education in its institutional form did not produce collectivity, and if collectivity is critical to producing and sustaining a women’s movement for social change at the grassroots, then “new” thought was required on the issue. The new thought, within the context of shifting discourses on women’s empowerment, suggested the return of self-help and using such a strategy to foster the collectives that already existed in some form at the village level. In the case of MS, these collectives were the village level sanghas. Efforts had been underway since the late 1990s to infuse self-help initiatives into the sanghas and push for the development of their federation at the state level.

The case of MS Karnataka, where the sanghas were particularly strong and well advised in self-help schemes, was cited at the meeting to restructure WDP. MS Banda and its educational interventions were not discussed at all at the meeting. The elites again became part of the re-circulation of development discourses, as did the government, without understanding or critiquing the problems of each in their grassroots reception. If institutionalization is inevitable, then how can women’s movement still create and sustain its own critical space against processes that curtail it? How can alliances be formed across institutional imperatives that do not eventually surrender to such imperatives?

Survival of a women’s movement, and agency stemming from it, is contingent upon such critical thought and action.

My interest in the program dates back to 1994, when I started working part-time

at an NGO for women’s education in Delhi. Here, I was introduced to the MS Banda program, but through MSK, a school for women that an NGO in Delhi was taking the initiative for setting up. I was the field researcher responsible for conducting village level

research in Banda that would then assist in creating a locally sensitive curriculum for the

school. Real life issues such as water and health became the subject matter for the

curriculum. I wrote chapters and supervised their use by the teachers at the school. My

life as a researcher and a consultant then was limited to MSK. Therefore, I had little sense

of the larger context of the program, of which the school was only a part, and of the

national and international discursive processes that gave shape to the program in 1989. It was expected that I knew and read about the MS program, but it was not considered an imperative to my job at and vis à vis MSK. However, I was also a Ph.D. candidate at

JNU, a graduate university in Delhi. A research proposal was required of me to progress further in the program. In this context, it became imperative for me to ask questions about the program and its genesis.

My initial question thus was simple: Why was a program for women’s education and empowerment instituted in 1989? While such interventions make sense in a country in which 60% of adolescent girls in rural areas are still illiterate, the program’s genesis at the moment marked by structural adjustment programs and economic liberalization was still a point for investigation. Was there, in fact, a connection between economic restructuring and women’s education? As a political scientist, I produced a two variable hypothesis—the particular nature of the interaction between the Indian state and women’s

movements in India in the 1990s. Crisis of governance (political and economic) required appeasement of pressure groups and movements in politically desirable ways, and MS was the direct result of such appeasement. I would then use my grassroots experiences as a way to empirically test the hypothesis. I could pick from questionnaires or other quantitative methods for this research.

However, when I shifted my intellectual home from political science to

anthropology, the question itself was recast as was my research methodology. The

recasting was relevant to my own intellectual leaning, which also coincided with the new

focus of anthropological inquiry into state and policy-making in the globalizing context

of the 1990s. Even as anthropology remained concerned with localized effects of state

policies negotiated through global agendas, theoretical inquires were being made into the

concept of state in the “new” world. The concept of the state as an independent entity that

controlled resources and decision making within its geographical domain was rendered

questionable by the extra-state sources of state-level policy-making in the 1990s. An even

more interesting observation was that, as globalization was breaking down the

institutional integrity of the state, it was also serving to reconstitute it.

Projects such as MS, it became possible to argue, were “new” strategies of

governance, whereby global imperatives were satisfied through the co-optation of

selective discourses of social change from within national parameters. By instituting MS

in the context of the 1990s, the Indian state was reconstituting itself and its strategies of

governance. Through MS, state-based legitimacy was also reconstituted in the minds of

the global and national development communities, the funding organizations, and the

women’s movement. My concern, therefore, finally came to rest on the issues of

institutionalization within the context of globalization. If the state used a program to re- institutionalize itself, then the program’s own institutionalization served to subvert its

radical potential in transforming women’s agency and their lived realities at the

grassroots. Ethnography therefore became my chosen method to critically map the

complexity of the process and of its localized effects in the Banda district, where the

program was first instituted in 1989.

The Sites and the Subjects of the Ethnography

The primary sites for collection of ethnographic data were Delhi, Jaipur, and the

Banda district of U.P. Delhi and Jaipur were selected because this is where the elites

(bureaucrats and NGO workers) reside and work. Banda was chosen as a site of study

because it was the first district in U.P. in which the MS program was implemented

(Nirantar: 1997). The Banda district, one of the largest districts of U.P., reflects at a

micro-level the “developmental deficits” of India’s most populous state, especially

relating to gender equality and agency. The basic indicator of women’s disadvantaged

position in the region is the low male-female ratio (1000:879), which stems from a higher

female mortality rate (16% higher than the male mortality rate), and female literacy that

remains close to zero in the villages of many districts of U.P., including Banda. The

literacy rate for scheduled caste females in the 7+ years’ age group is below 1.5% in 18

out of 63 districts of U.P. (Nirantar: 1997, Sen and Dreze: 1994).

In Delhi and Jaipur, ethnographic data was collected through interviews,

participant observations, and archival research. I interviewed the senior level government

bureaucrat, who is credited with the “idea of MS,” and a well known activist from the

voluntary sector, whose help the government bureaucrat enlisted to formulate the MS

program that would, through education, “transform women’s consciousness and material

conditions” (Kudwa: 1996, Ramachandran: 1995). The other academic/activist was

unavailable for her expert commentary on the program.

Through these interviews, I attempted to understand the origins of bureaucratic

sympathy for the voluntary sector, especially when the bureaucracy in India is

“notorious” for creating bottlenecks in the successful implementation of social policies

(Kumar: 1998). I asked the woman activists about their experience of making the policy

document in a record 45 days and any previous experiences that affected the content and

goals of the MS program (Kudwa: 1996). The women activists drew upon their experience as members of SPARC, an NGO working with pavement dwellers in Bombay and working for WDP, instituted by the federal government in the western state of

Rajasthan in the early 1980s (Garain: 1998, Kudwa: 1996). I would have liked to interview Dutch funding agency representatives, who debated the program proposal, agreed to fund it, and have evaluated the program at the grassroots every year in March

(Government of Netherlands Report: 1992). I was, however, unable to conduct the interviews due to their unavailability in India at the time of the study and lack of

resources to travel to the Netherlands in search of possible answers. Nevertheless, I was

able to access archival material at the local library in Delhi that provided insights into the

reasons for Dutch support for an educational program for women in India.

Both participant observation and perusal through archival material can highlight the particular ways of elite thinking and arguing regarding developmental issues, as well as ways of identifying and classifying subjects of developmental interventions (Weiss:

1986). Therefore, I tried to participate in elite-level meetings to observe first hand how education and empowerment, as concepts, are debated in such forums. I attended one such meeting in Jaipur in 2002. Although the meeting did not specifically focus on MS, it was concerned with WDP and the need to restructure it in the present context. The roundtable discussion brought forth bureaucrats, women’s groups, feminist academics, and local women’s activists. The nature of the discussions provided first hand insights into the nature of government-NGO interactions that could find parallels with similar discussions that led to the creation of the MS program. I later examined MS policy documents, including minutes of previous meetings. The archives at the NGO in Delhi were particularly useful.

In Banda, I interviewed two MS-Banda coordinators, who are urban women from the voluntary sector. The coordinators and their local team of women, in turn, were responsible for disseminating the program intentions and recruiting more members at the village level. Only with local input were the curriculum and technical training programs implemented at the village level (Nirantar: 1997, Kudwa: 1996, Ramachandran: 1995).

The coordinator and different village/district level functionaries shed light on the trials and tribulations of creating an environment and curriculum for education in the Banda region, a region that has historically suppressed women’s agency and denied them access to basic literacy (Nirantar: 1997, Sen: 1994). Again, how a written policy document is

transformed into specific strategies at the local level was gleaned through interviews in which women who, in their own words in the present, spoke about the nature of meetings in the past. As such, interviews, participant observations, and archival research in Banda maximized description and discovery of, for example, how MS-Banda identified handpump training as a strategy to create an environment for education in the region.

I also interviewed different functionaries of the program such as the sahyoginis

(program supervisors), sahelis (teachers), and learners. These women had been with the

MS program since its inception) in 1989 and participated in its three important phases in different capacities: collective organizing for women-specific issues in the region, handpump training and literacy camps, and six-month intensive curriculum training or

Mahila Shikshan Kendra (MSK) (Nirantar: 1997). These women also were residents of

12 of the 194 villages (and one city, Karwi) in the Banda district. In the villages, the MS program had been operational since 1989 and its district office was situated in Karwi, a city in Banda (Nirantar: 1997). Finally, these women were between the ages of 25 to 50 years, most (although not all) belonged to the “Kol” caste, the lowest in the caste hierarchy in the region, and had either some or no formal schooling during their childhood (Nirantar: 1997, MS-Banda Survey: 1990).

I re-acquainted myself with these respondents in 2002 and 2003 through a writing workshop for a local women’s newspaper, Khabar Lehriya, in Banda. The paper is sponsored by a local NGO. The workshop was organized by the same NGO for which I had worked. I volunteered my expertise towards fostering women’s writing skills. It was a challenge to translate Western theories of writing into journalistic style writing in the

local language of Bundeli. However, the workshop also was an opportunity to seek out correspondents who were previously associated with MS in different capacities. The workshop therefore became an alternate setting for discussions about MS to be sharply foregrounded. The participants volunteered interviews during the day, as they took breaks from the workshop, or later in the night. The women brought new and critical perspectives on the history of the program in the region, even as they were openly emotional about its exit from Banda in 2001. To conduct this ethnography in 2002 and

2003, I had to negotiate through new agendas and projects of NGOs and a local newspaper. This helped me, an outsider, to again become an insider to new events related to and beyond MS. Only through advocacy-based research for an NGO could I legitimately conduct an ethnography of MS in Banda. In other words, advocacy-based research provided a comparative and critical perspective of MS Banda.

Organization of the Remainder of the Dissertation

This dissertation is divided into six chapters. Chapter 1 provides a short history of the MS program. This material allows us to focus on the question of contents: How did the program come to be? It examines the points of intersections between political events, international economic imperatives, and discourse on women’s development as emergent from grassroots women’s movements in the South in the 1990s. The specificity of a programmatic articulation and the process of its construction are pinpointed through the descriptions of the contexts. In other words, the genesis of the institutionalization of a particular configuration of cause and effect is highlighted through the larger contexts of its articulation. These larger contexts include the internal political crisis of a nation in

which the woman and low caste question foregrounds the battle for identity between two

political groups. The contexts also include the interactions between stateness, women’s

movements, and education as the subject of international concern in the 1990s.

Understanding the origins and content of MS is facilitated through elaborations of such

contexts. This then provides the foundation for reading the ethnographies that follow—

women talking about the program as an experience that is never homogenous, but always

conflicted in person and across positions of responsibilities within the program.

Chapter 2 begins with the physical description of the site of the first ethnography—the Banda district in U.P. This site then forms the background for discussing feminist agency through different levels of the program, starting with the learner. This is a deliberate choice. The final stage of the institutionalization of education, a school for women, and the learner’s experience within it, is elaborated. Education as structured learning in specified spaces, and how it produces a certain kind of a learner and, more importantly, a certain kind of woman, is discussed. Further, issues such as how education promotes women’s collective agency or individual agency and whether a learner, given a locally sensitive, meaningful curriculum, shares such education in her community and towards what end or whether her agency promotes her own personal agenda are considered in depth. The dilemmas of collective versus individual agency are discussed through the experience of the learner in MSK and especially in relation to agency’s articulations in the program document and that of the feminist theoretician. This chapter shows that MSK as an example of institutionalized education, individualized the experience of empowerment for the learners. Individual empowerment was essentially

economic empowerment or the ability to earn from their education and provide for their

families. Individual or economic empowerment did not translate into women servicing

their particular individual needs, but rather their social roles. Learners participated in and

observed collective mobilization of a particular issue in the village or in the city, but

never as a course requirement. Therefore, developing their collective, with a certain

identified purpose, was neither a necessity nor was enforced in the interest of social

change. The theoretical expectation of the program (education produces collective-based

empowerment) did not become realized in MSK or through institutionalized education in

Banda.

Chapter 3 concerns the sahelis or the teachers at the same school the learners

attended. This chapter examines their participation in further institutionalizing the education component of MS and how such participation affected in their lives, personally and professionally. We observe here how the sahelis bore the responsibilities of conducting an education that, while borrowing from available sources of information, produced local sensitive versions of it. Even as they had the freedom to produce and transact their own material, this freedom was directed by the larger need to institutionalize an educational curriculum that was also, at the same time, reflective of local languages, concepts, and materials. The sahelis’ particular relationship with the program, which was one of economic dependency (MSK was their job), and their middleness (using the input of the consultants at the top in transacting materials to the learner at the bottom), produced different meanings of empowerment within MSK, post-

MSK, and with regard to MS as an NGO for women.

For the sahelis, as for the learners, empowerment was economic. They bought property and built homes for themselves and their families. Social empowerment did not accompany such economic capability, however. The sahelis’ informed position on patriarchy did not come into play when they concentrated on making a spouse happy by desiring and producing a son. Education therefore became reduced to a curriculum that the sahelis transacted in an institution, rather than information that they could use to question even their own participation in certain normative practices. Like the learners, sahelis did not focus on collectivization as a strategy for self-affirming changes. Its importance was articulated, but never felt, in MSK, except when the program made a quick exit from Banda without informing even its own staff, including the sahelis. The sahelis realized that, in their non-collective self, their disempowerment could be found vis à vis political practices and decisions.

Chapter 4 focuses on the sahyoginis, the supervisors or the agents who would become the ears and the voice of the program. The sahyoginis were involved with making the program known to women in villages in Banda. They were never directly concerned with literacy or the MSK. Instead, they were involved with mobilizing women around village specific issues and providing information to address such problems. They were responsible for creating the link between the women’s movement and the program, as well as using the former to concretize the latter (e.g., handpump training, building houses). The mobilization experience empowered the sahyoginis in terms of their own capabilities to engender such a strategy in villages and found them capable of engendering changes in their own lives.

If the sahelis were involved with education as schooling, the sahyoginis were

involved with education as information, to assist sanghas in mobilizing for a cause. This

produced notions of empowerment that, in many ways, resembled the articulations of the

feminist theoretician. For the theoretician, empowerment for women must begin and end with mobilization. Education must be used towards such an end and not only towards

individual well being. The sahyoginis derived their identity from creating the need for

mobilization and directing it in specific ways. At the same time, they also served their own personal needs to further educate themselves. However, unlike the sahelis, who continued to negotiate their existence within problematic relationships and institutions

such as marriage, the sahyoginis (at least some of them) were able to remove themselves

from such relationships and find contentment in being single and responsible only for

themselves and their children. Empowerment therefore is mediated through a position

and its requirements in the program.

Sahelis or learners, in the context of their institutionalized relationship, were

never directly involved with collectivization or what it can engender. The sahyoginis, in

contrast, were directly involved in crafting collectives at the village level and observing

first hand the effects of collective agency on institutionalized discrimination. Yet, the sahyoginis never transferred the experience to build their own collective. This was never so sharply foregrounded than at the moment of the program’s exit from Banda. As individuals, they held no bargaining power against decision-makers at the highest level.

Yet, as individuals, the sahyoginis state their empowerment in social, more than in economic, terms. They value the experience of critically thinking about their lives as

women, but more in terms of applying its core ideas towards making a change. They value their singlehood as much as the happiness that emanates from it. In this sense, their empowerment is different from that of the sahelis and the learners. But in the absence of a collective identity, all three sets of functionaries are similar. The local level experiences

of empowerment therefore are contrary to elite level expectations that a women’s

movement was possible through a reconstructed, but institutionalized, education.

Chapter 5 concerns the coordinators of the program. These were urban educated

women, who took on the challenge of replicating their own experience and understanding

of the women’s movement in national and international contexts at the local level. Their

tasks as outsiders were, first, to prove that they belonged in the context, even if it was for

the sake of the program and, second, to recruit local women, who would further add to

their legitimate claim to the space and to their agendas in transforming the landscape with

a woman bias. The coordinators describe the contradictions that became focal points

between feminist collectivization, women’s agency, and the program. Such contradictions

were sharply foregrounded when the force of government legitimacy was used towards

random acts of dispensing justice in the local context. If a man was accused of rape, they

would take the program jeep, hunt down the perpetrator, blacken his face, and parade him

on a donkey through the city streets. These acts derived from the coordinators’ own sense

of what was wrong and how to right it, especially if the local agencies such as the police

were insensitive to such issues. The act did not derive from the victim’s articulations of

what she thought was justice or from a more negotiated notion, developed through group

discussion of what needs to be done in the case of such events.

The concern here is how one can put the force of social disapproval behind such

acts, rather than engender social disapproval of these acts. Most of all, this chapter elaborates on how, through their acts of mobilizing women, the coordinators deliberately created such a demand for literacy and later for curriculum instruction that they were mandated to be provided through other means (education NGOs). While they credit

themselves for creating a vibrant and effective women’s movement, even if issue- specific, they also have a developed critique of the increasing bureaucratization of the

program. Providing women wages and travel allowances for participating in mobilization

was an incentive that the coordinators hoped would help women learn the value of

collectivization in the future; however, it produced the opposite effect. A dependency

relation was created between the women and the program and made the latter more a

government program than a feminist NGO in the local setting. This relationship thus

complicated agency and circumscribed it within the program.

Chapter 6 elaborates on MS as a political strategy that was the result of

negotiations between a bureaucrat and urban feminist academics and theoreticians. The

chapter shows that a dominant group (the government) can be sensitive to the condition

of an oppressed group (rural women) within a context and through its particular

articulation by feminist academics. It also presents, in the narratives of its protagonists (a

bureaucrat, a feminist theoretician, and feminist academic), how a process of making

policy about women can blur institutional boundaries (between government and NGOs)

and how the policy’s implementation as an engrafting of an NGO at the local level

recreates these boundaries. This chapter also shows that feminist agency in local settings,

as the result of intervention, may be similar to or different from the standpoint that defined it. Its manifestations create a ripple effect in the standpoint theory that then struggles to understand it or even reject it. In other words, a program is conceptualized according to a theoretical and empirical understanding of women’s condition locally, but its local institutionalization takes different forms. These forms demand different skills and training. These training-specific experiences in an undulating cultural environment influence women’s agency and the choices that women make with regard to their lives.

Policy, therefore, cannot predetermine women’s agency and the specific forms it takes locally, even as its cause-effect configuration is based on a nuanced understanding of a condition.

I conclude by summarizing the arguments in the previous chapters. I highlight the particular institutional locations of the elites, which determines how they participate in critique development or even help constitute it. In Jaipur, Rajasthan, a meeting was organized in 2002 to discuss a possible restructuring of WDP there. WDP was considered a precursor to MS; in other words, the shortcomings of WDP were made good in MS. If

WDP did not mandate literacy, if and when the demand for it arose in the field, and by women, then this was mandated through MS. MS was also made possible within the international context and the focus on education as a strategy for women’s development.

Therefore, as the context changed when the focus turned to self-help, WDP needed to be reconstituted and the focus of MS turned away from education. This also means that the elite borrowed their own institutional locations, from the context of development, and trimmed their articulations accordingly. How the developmental policies affect people at

the ground level is used selectively to rationalize for their shifting nature rather than its critique.

CHAPTER 1

“EDUCATION FOR WOMEN’S EQUALITY AND EMPOWERMENT”:

THE MAHILA SAMAKHAYA PROGRAM

Introduction

This chapter is concerned with one important question: Considering the history of

“uneasy partnerships” between the government and NGOs, what affected the decision by

the government of India to invite selected representatives of the feminist movement to

institute a program for women’s education and empowerment in rural India? This chapter

identifies the macrological frames, which, in their particular affinities and facilitated by

geo-political realities in the 1990s, produced the MS education program. Borrowing from

Akhil Gupta (1997), three macrological frames are included. The first is the new

international development discourse in the 1990s that was spurred by the collapse of the

Soviet Union. As a funding and strategic partner exited from the world arena, problems

of development in the Third World were foregrounded as problems of democracy and of

stunted capitalist growth. Liberalization and structural adjustment programs followed as a matter of national and international urgency.

The second macrological frame is therefore a reconfigured nationalist discourse

that also accommodated the imperatives of a reconstituted international economic order.

The trajectory of this national discourse on development was determined by and in tune

with the international framework, yet included “national” actors—the state, NGOs, and

experts. Generally, oppositional groups were brought into a collaboration for the sake of a national planning that was determined by the nature of the debt, which had intensified

the applicative force of the international imperatives. This was also an opportunity for oppositional actors to reinscribe the modalities of governmentality in a globalizing world; where the movement (its work and ideological basis) was supplied information to construct a nationalist discourse and framework for development. This national international scramble for national and global identity was principally premised on the condition of the grassroots, which also became the subject of the intervention and, later, its principal critics.

The third macrological frame is the grassroots acceptance or and resistance to the

MS program. This ethnography is framed by grassroots articulations and reactions against the program, specifically, and the discourses that animate the policy, generally. The idea is to show how the grassroots women, while being implicated in institutionalizing education at that level, experienced empowerment in complicated ways. In this chapter, a short history of MS Banda (U.P.) is followed by a discussion of the historically contentious relationship between the state and women’s movements in India. This discussion focuses on how the “woman question,” over time, has framed the nationalist discourse of a colonial or a post-colonial state. In fact, the Indian state has found its particular rationale in the reform of Indian womanhood and in conducting development towards such an end.

The discussion also shows how the women’s movement has formed its identity within and in opposition to the nationalist discourse. If gendered concerns could be articulated only within the parameters of a nationalistic discourse in the context of colonialism, then the post-independence, women’s movement formed their identities in

opposition to a nation-state. The unease in the state-movement relationship has

continued, except when geo-political changes have brought the two actors in conversation

with each other, especially regarding women’s development. The MS program is the result of one such important conversation between the state and representatives of the women’s movement.

The chapter also discusses the international conferences on education in the 1990s

that framed a national level discussion on women’s education and empowerment and

produced the MS program. These discussions then frame the multi-level ethnographies

that follow this chapter. The implementation of education in Banda is discussed by

different women in different positions of responsibility vis à vis the program. Each

discussant explains her contribution to developing education as well as institutionalizing

it in the local context. Each discussant reflects on empowerment in relation to her

particular contribution. Since education had multiple meanings and forms in Banda,

conceptual notions of empowerment also differ from one level to another. The easy

relation between education and empowerment in policy is rendered uneasy and

complicated in its grassroots receptions.

A Short History of MS-Banda

In 1989, the Department of Human Resources, Government of India, inaugurated

the Mahila Samakhaya program. Mahila Samakhaya (MS) means “education for

women’s equality and empowerment.” The program claimed to create a new kind of

education that would produce a “new” woman, economically self-reliant and

intellectually trained to question and change the structural inequalities that beset her

(Ramachandran: 1995). Bureaucrats and feminist academics and activists collaborated on creating the program and identified low caste rural women in select regions of the

country as its exclusive recipients. The program, created in the context of neo-

liberalization in 1989 and primarily funded by the Dutch government, had been operating

in rural areas of Uttar-Pradesh, Karnataka, Gujarat, Bihar, and Andhra Pradesh (MS

Policy Document: 1989). Uttar-Pradesh, particularly the Banda district, is the focus of

this ethnography.

Organizational Structure of MS

Although the MS program was a government program, its broad mandate proved

conducive to developing a flexible organizational structure at the district level. At the

core of the organizational structure were village level women’s groups called Mahila

Sanghas. Village level activists or the sakhis were instrumental in activating the sangha

of their village in terms of taking up issues, discussing problems, and holding village

level meetings. These women were usually non-literate, poor, and low caste. Sahyoginis

or supervisors, who generally had some formal education, coordinated the work of 10

villages. They provided leadership and played a catalytic role in building and sustaining

the sangha, as well as provided a link to the district office. The district office, in turn,

coordinated, helped plan and oversee the work of the entire district, and was staffed by a

district coordinator and resource person.

The criteria for the selection of village and district level functionaries included the

ability to work with and be empathetic to women, willingness to eat and drink water with

the women in their village (which demonstrated the ability to question caste prejudices in

practice), showing courage in the face of rebuffs and rejection by the women and the village community, encouraging the spirit of discussion about issues with different people within the village (as the women’s access to education depended severely on their approval), and willingness to participate in residential training sessions for periods of 10 to 15 days (which showed a willingness to compromise familial responsibilities for work obligations). However, one factor that was considered above everything else was the ability to take on leadership roles and initiatives. A sakhi was expected to identify issues in her village and craft strategies accordingly to resolve them. A sahyogini was expected to provide informational support to the sakhi, but not take on the task meant for them.

Similarly, the district office provided training and informational support to the sahyoginis, without intruding on their style of supervising and directing the educational work in their 10 villages. For example, if a sakhi knew that the main issue in her village was fair wages every harvesting season, she should take the initiative to bring together women to fight for their rights. They could devise protest measures whereby they could decline to cut the yield for the headman (usually the richest landowner) and influence other women from nearby village to also decline to do this. This way, they could collectively force the landowner to agree to their demands. The sahyogini, in this case, can consult with the district office on the possible negative ramifications of such a move

(the landowner becoming violent and vengeful towards the women) and convey the same to the sakhi and her group. In turn, she also can participate with the sakhi in initiating a discussion with the landowner on why it is not only just, but also legally appropriate, to be fair in terms of wages. Facilitation, rather than direction, was considered the core of

the program. An environment of debate and discussion was deliberately fostered so that

program functionaries could feel a sense of ownership towards the program and

henceforth work to give the program a strong identity in the region.

The Three Phases of MS in Banda: Institutionalizing Education

The history of the program in the region, in terms of its achievements in regard to

education, can be divided roughly into three phases—collectivization, training (mechanic

and literacy), and the Mahila Shikshan Kendra (MSK) or the six-month residential curriculum training for women and adolescent girls. Each phase fed into the other and the

subsequent strategies developed out of the experience and demands generated through the

previous phase. For example, the collectivization phase was about building women’s

groups at the level of the village such that its larger mobilization could be fashioned for

alleviation of festering local level issues. At the same time, collectivization also served as

strategy for generating an articulated need for literacy, which the program was then

mandated to provide.

During the conduct of one such mobilization, where women from a number of

village gathered at the office of the Jal Nigam (water board) in Karwi, a city in

Chitrakoot, to protest government apathy toward water supply in their village, the need

for literacy (basic reading and writing skills) was foregrounded. The women shouted

slogans outside the office and demanded that they meet with the senior officer to discuss

their demands. Finally, after two days of picketing, the women were invited into the

office. The officer promised them that he would send his team of mechanics to fix the

handpumps in the villages represented. The women wanted this promise in writing.

Because they could not read or write, they had gotten help in writing a petition. The officer agreed and scribbled something on the petition.

The women assumed that the officer gave in writing what he had verbally

promised. Mobilization was then declared successful. However, the coordinator saw

nothing on the paper that said that the officer had indeed agreed to redress the women’s

water problem. The officer had only signed his name under the word “received,” stamped

on the petition. The women were in disbelief and soon that disbelief turned to anger, first

against the office and later against themselves. They realized (in fact were led to realize

through a discussion of the episode) that their illiterate status had made their victory

hollow and their mobilization effort naught. Ten-day residential literacy camps followed, which were attended by, among other women, all the petitioners.

Even as the literacy camps served to launch the program as per its mandate

(education to empower women), they were only one-time interventions. The concerns

that followed from the experience of the camps by the learners and program experts

included what would happen post-literacy. How do the women or the program sustain the

fragile skills of the neo-literates? MS was seen as a program that would answer such

questions that programs in the past had failed to address. If empowerment was to be a

comprehensive process, could literacy that was imparted in 10 days be sufficient for such

a process to occur? Could women’s literacy skills mean anything in a context in which

such literacy could not be mobilized to make the local government more accountable?

Isn’t a literate condition, within the context of a persisting water problem, an anomaly to

women’s empowerment as envisioned within the MS? What if literacy were combined

with training for women to be water mechanics? This last question could be seen as a proposal to serve the purpose of honing women’s literacy and technical skills, so that caste- and gender-based exclusionism could be questioned and reformed.

Handpump Training and the Issue of Caste

In 1991, the first handpump mechanics training for women was organized at the

MS office in Karwi. Extensive discussions with the Jal Nigam to participate in such training sessions preceded this event. Initially, the Jal Nigam trainers voiced skepticism about women’s ability to learn technical jargon and the women affirmed such a sentiment through a show of fear. Yet, both eventually settled down into a teacher-learner pattern, even as the modalities of the pattern needed to be worked out to ease tensions. The women proved to the trainers that lifting a 20-foot steel pipe and loading it on to a bicycle was not an impossible task for their gender, even as this was a strategy for their exclusion from male-dominated technical areas of expertise. The trainers thereafter settled into a professional role to share their technical expertise with the women.

The women, having struggled with a fear of failing the “course,” were able to devise means of making sense of the technical jargon with their basic reading and writing skills, with the help of the program functionaries. For example, they gave “people names” to various parts of the handpump. A 20-foot wrench pipe was likened to a tall woman in the group and her name thereafter became synonymous with the object of concern. Even as their training was nearing completion, the women’s main concern was being accepted in their new roles and identities by their families and communities. The women mechanics, in their particular roles, could potentially question caste or class hierarchies in

the region, but the social impact of their work still remained to be seen. In the meantime

(January 1995), MSK began in the city of Karwi in Banda. MSK, according to the MS

coordinators, was the supply side to an evolving demand for school-like training from the

neo-literate women, especially adolescent girls who regularly attended village level

centers.

Mahila Shikshan Kendra (MSK): The Center for Education of Women

The selections for the MSK were made by the district supervisors on the

recommendation of the sahelis or teachers, who ran literacy centers at the village levels.

Six handpump mechanics were the first ones to enroll. The curriculum was developed as part of consultations between an NGO in Delhi and member of the District

Implementation Unit (DIU) of MS-Banda. The NGO conducted its own research on the social, cultural, political, and geographical terrain of the region. This way, the NGO familiarized its own members with the context of its intervention so that the curriculum they developed was locally sensitive. The final curriculum was thus broadly divided as land, water, forests, and health to reflect the real life concerns of the local women. Each

lesson covered was handwritten by the sahelis in the Hindi and Bundeli languages.

Exercises accompanied these lessons, which “tested” not just the reading and writing skills of the students, but also the way in which they processed the information.

Critical inquiry and debate remained the principal emphasis of MSK. This also produced interesting dilemmas for the project. The teachers initiated a discussion on sati

(widow burning) to see whether the spirit of critique animated the students’ articulations.

In their discussion, however, women seemed more reluctant to outright reject sati as

wrong cultural practice than did the girls. The women, instead, proceeded to differentiate

“forced sati” from “genuine sati.” They explained that genuine sati occurs when a woman

“possessed by sat or truth” willingly throws herself on her dead husband’s pyre. Forced sati is when the woman is an unwilling partner in the act. The latter should be punishable, but not the former. Since there is no way of distinguishing between a “genuine” and

“forced” sati, such dichotomization reflects the selective ways in which the women processed the information. This also shows how women, when faced with the knowledge that a cultural practice is equal to murder, reject the latter without necessarily rejecting the practice. However, in 2001, the MSKs were shut down, especially as MS wound up its operations in Karwi. Allegations of embezzlement in the district office forced a government decision to close the program and, at the same time, international funding for the program also was withdrawn.

Locating the Genesis of MS: Nationalist Discourse, International

Development, and Social Movements

Knowledge of the genesis of the program, however, must precede any discussion of its closure. In its genesis lies the reason for its demise. How and why MS was instituted in 1989 (and not before) is the concern of this section. In this section, the particular intersections of nationalism, internationalism, and social movements/activist organizations through different historical times are discussed. The aim is to show that such intersections have principally aligned with the “woman question” and in ways that each component was reconstituted. Indian nationalism, for example, in the context of colonialism, became premised on the reform of Indian womanhood. Such reform served

to reconstitute a nationalist gender-hierarchy that, when superimposed on the notion of

private versus public also helped imagine dichotomous colonial/nationalist zones of

performance. To flourish, a feminist identity and movement had to keep within such

parameters of description. However, “feminism,” when pegged to a masculinist,

nationalist identity, survived on borrowed meaning. Women’s issues were nationalist

issues and vice versa.

Nationalism, however, within the context of colonialism, also provided, even

though contentious, space for feminist discourses to find their empirical depth. For

example, the civil disobedience movement (1942) was a mass movement, for which

women were consciously recruited. The women realized their critical importance to the

legitimacy and mass appeal of nationalism. They also knew that an Indian women’s movement for equality and justice could flourish within the parameters of nationalism

and not in opposition to it. Yet, in post-independent India, women’s movements were

forged in opposition to the state. Women enjoyed the right to equality as a constitutional

right, yet suffered unequal treatment in their workplace and at home.

The continued apathy of the state toward the woman question inaugurated a new

era of “uneasy partnerships” between the government and women’s movements. Even as

the “problematic” of being born female was emphasized in the new movement, there

remained a heightened awareness of “woman” as a differentiated category. Theories of

biological determinism were inadequate to explain the “woman condition,” especially if

caste, religion, class, and community determined such a condition in complex ways. Such

complexity therefore added to the dilemma of a holistic campaign—justice and equality

for whom? Who was the subaltern? These were important questions to consider for a movement intending to influence the state towards gender-sensitive programs, laws, and interventions.

How to engage with “difference” among women towards a united campaign on

common issues has continued to be a dilemma for the women’s movement. Often

campaigns against dowry deaths were organized to focus on state apathy towards the

quality of women’s lives. If collective campaigns were intended to make the state

accountable to women’s lives, then the strategy worked in some ways, but not in others.

Contemporary political agendas determined how (or whether) the state would respond to

women’s demands. Further, to sustain a movement over a long period of time requires an

unshakeable commitment, but, most importantly, resources. Sometimes both were

lacking.

Women’s Movements or Women’s NGOs? 1980s to 1990s

However, between the 1970s and 1980s, development itself underwent a change,

as had the women’s movement. Empowerment replaced development and the women’s

movement became part of an explosion in the number of non-party affiliated,

ideologically left of center movement organizations known as NGOs. Their goals

included decentralized political decision-making, women’s rights, civil liberties,

achievement of economic power at the grassroots, right to a safe environment, education

and health care, and growth in personal and group autonomy. Yet, at the heart of it was

empowerment—empowering those who lacked the power to change their lives.

In the 1980s therefore, project-based collaboration was made possible between the Indian government and women’s groups. Their collaboration was driven further by an economic imperative—debt crises for the government and the quantity of international funds now made available for community empowerment programs. If the economic imperatives drive the government to change its old ways of doing development and with social groups knowledgeable about the grassroots, the same imperative also drives the movement towards its NGO-ized form of conducting such a development with the government. It also made “empowerment” (initially a word that made the governments uneasy) a more acceptable goal for governments in the Third World.

In India, the Towards Equality Report (1974) and the Shramshakti Report (1988) provide two comparable assessments, not only of the Indian women in two different time frames, but also of the shifting notions of development. The former identifies “regression and powerlessness” as the major drawback to Indian’s women’s situation. The latter, however, signifies a new convergence in government and NGO agendas regarding women’s empowerment. The Shramshakti Report highlighted the general agreement between the government and women’s NGOs to support women’s grassroots efforts and organizations. This was meant to further foster women’s collective strengths, social mobility, and bargaining power.

Empowerment is Economic: The Microfinance Paradigm

For the longest time, empowerment was equated with microfinance projects. The aim of microfinance was to reduce rural poverty within a reasonable timeframe by building the entrepreneurial capacities of the ultra-poor women. It has produced

contradictory effects on the lives of rural women. Some have argued that micro-credit has

benefited women; it has enhanced women’s productive means by increasing their access

to cash through market oriented activities and given them ownership of nonland assets.

An economically empowered woman is also a socially empowered individual. Economic stability can inspire women to take better care of themselves and their families. In other

words, women who involved themselves in income generation activities had more control

over household expenditure and their lives in self-affirming ways.

Some, however, are skeptical (even critical) of the easy connections being drawn between empowerment and microfinance, especially when the real effects of the intervention are contrary to assertions. The implementation process has been problematic,

and the criterion to identify the poor in the field had been faulty. For example, asking the

local people to identify the poor among them is impractical. Using agricultural assets as

representative of poverty may either exclude women altogether or render it impossible to

map poverty across cultures.

Nevertheless, microfinance was an important intervention, not only as an alternate

policy to empower women individually, but also collectively. Even as autonomy and

economic independence were considered important to individual woman’s

empowerment, it was considered contingent upon group cohesion. Unless women could

support each other and agree to build their own collective for themselves, their

individuality would be a fragile entity in their cultural space. For women to be

individually empowered, they had to collectively come together and challenge (alleviate)

their subordinate condition. However, group cohesion is as tedious a process as it is

volatile. Trust in matters of money within a group is shaky. Alternately, if the feasibility of a group depends on the timely return of loans borrowed from its coffers and if an individual threatens such feasibility, then the latter can be on the receiving end of disciplinary action. This can lead to isolation of an individual and even threaten the cohesion of the group.

Some others have argued that the governmentalization of micro-credit has short- circuited the process of empowerment for women. By governmentalization, they mean controlling the resources for a program and its effects. Once such effects are observed in some form, the program is considered a success and, thereafter, the individuals are left to be responsible for themselves and for the direction their lives take. The government relinquishes its responsibility to understand or even to forge the effects it helped produce.

As such, examples of initiatives by non-governmental groups or organizations such as the

Self-Employed Women’s Association (SEWA) are forwarded to show the difference.

Women’s groups that are formed and formalized through consensus among themselves are more sustainable than are those that are the result of a governmental imperative. When participation in a group is a result of debate about what keeps women subordinated, and when the resilience of the group is a result of a collective understanding of what skills women possess to end such subordination, then empowerment occurs. Empowerment can thus be defined as differently as the structures through which it is negotiated and intended to be realized. Empowerment can be many things or can remain as fuzzy in terms of its definition. It can be as much about economic

independence as building a positive self-image or as much about defining and promoting

one’s own agenda for change as building group cohesion.

The questions concern whether these definitions of empowerment are mutually

reinforcing or contradictory; what happens to such definitions in a different context, for

example, education rather than microfinance; and what happens to such definitions when

the government collaborates with feminist NGOs to launch an education program to

specifically empower low caste women at the grassroots. The MS program (1989) could be seen as an interesting culmination of different trends in development processes and structures—in which development went from being the exclusive domain of the state to a partnership between the state and NGOs and from being exclusively economic to a matter of education, critical reflection, and decision-making, as well as borrowed its contours and purpose from the lived grassroots realities of its subjects and used their explicit participation in the creation of the program.

Academic research did not provide the core material for the MS program.

Demographic studies use schooling interchangeably with education and literacy ,without explaining the conflation (The World’s Women: 1995, Personal communication: 1992).

They also causally connect rising levels of schooling to declining levels of fertility, without accounting for factors that may complicate this relation, e.g., women who have more schooling are more likely to live in urban spaces or that, in many Asian countries, where the population problem is considered grave, primary education is not compulsory

(Jain: 1998, Jafferey: 1998, Moni and Nag: 1993, Caldwell: 1986). The few studies

(Bateille: 1992, Kumar: 1992, Karlekar: 1989, Chanana: 1988) that link gender

differences in school level education in contemporary India to education’s colonial

legacy in South Asia still conflate schooling with education and show literacy as adult

education. Therefore, current research did not assist in understanding the connection made between education and rural women’s empowerment in policy in the late 1980s.

Instead, four international conferences on education organized under the aegis of the UN and the World Bank during the same period contributed to this understanding. Nationally, programs that preceded MS in intent, such as the WDP in Rajasthan, were evaluated to create a new policy on education for women.

Education is Empowering: International Conferences and National Policies

An Inter-Agency Commission established by UNDP, UNICEF, UNESCO, and the World Bank sponsored a World Conference on Education for All in Jomtien,

Thailand, from March 5-9, 1989. The Commission’s background drafts on the conference alluded to a growing international consensus on human development as the core to any

development process across the world, re-emphasized education as human right and a

social responsibility, and equated education with empowerment (Draft A: Introduction).

The commission saw education as the solution to some of the global challenges of the

1990s, including economic stagnation, widening economic disparities regionally and

locally, dislocation of people through wars and strife, environmental degradation, and

rapid population growth.

The conference also recognized that inequitable access to primary and secondary

education is due to systems of social stratification. Those higher up in social and

economic hierarchies controlled resources and means of information, thereby depriving

those at the bottom of such rights. However, the aim of education was not to break down stratification, but foster dialogue across it. Social dialogue was considered critical to alleviating endemic local and global problems, especially economic stagnation and environmental degradation.

Education as a right for all was re-affirmed at the International Conference on

Population and Development (Cairo, 1994). For the first time, a population conference looked into and made obvious the connections between population, poverty, gender inequality, and development. The conference recognized that “everyone has a right to education, which shall be directed to the full development of human resources, and human dignity and potential, with particular attention to women and the girl child.

Education should be designed to strengthen respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms, including those related to population and development” (Agenda for Action,

ICPD, 1994, p. 10).

The Copenhagen Declaration on Social Development (1995) took yet another step to placing women’s and girls’ education at the center of human development and social justice. It affirmed that “in both economic and social terms, the most productive policies and investments are those that empower people to maximize their capacities, resources, and opportunities” (Paragraph 7). But it was the Fourth World Conference on Women, in

Beijing (1995) that explicitly connected education to empowerment of women. It stated that education shall play an interventionist role in changing the lived realities of women and girls such that they can live a life of dignity and purpose.

As seen above, by the middle of the 1990s, four international conferences had

focused on education for marginalized populations as critical to developing their human

capacities and empowering them to realize and assert their human rights. Such intense

advocacy within the international community for girls’ and women’s right to education

forced participating member countries to create a policy environment that was

deliberative and innovative in terms of initiatives for the realization of such a right. The

conferences also inspired governments in North America and Europe and international

NGOs to fund education projects for women in Asia and Africa.

India was one of the few countries then that had a national policy on education.

This policy, in 1986, gave priority to education as a human right and a means for bringing

about a transformation of the society towards a “genuinely egalitarian and secular social

order” and where “education was seen as an ‘instrument for securing a status of equality for women and persons belonging to the backward classes and minorities’” (Resolution of the Government of India, No. F.1-6/90-PN, May 7, 1990). The policy reflected some of the concerns of the 1981 census on literacy for women. The data showed that, in rural areas, only 10% of the scheduled caste/class women were literate and more than 70% of the girls in the age group of 6-14 years, with most belonging to the scheduled castes, had never been to school.

Between 1986 and 1992, considered the most creative period in the history of basic education and women’s education in India, six new education initiatives were launched by the government. These included the Andhra Pradesh Primary Education

Project, funded by the British ODA (1986), Rajasthan Shiksha Karmi Project, with the

support of Swedish International Development Agency (SIDA) (1987), Mahila

Samakhaya Program in Karnataka, Uttar-Pradesh, Gujarat, and Andhra Pradesh, with

assistance from the Netherlands in 1988-89, Bihar Education Project, with UNICEF

support in 1990, Uttar-Pradesh Basic Education Project, with World Bank aid in 1991,

and the Rajasthan Lok Jumbish Project, with SIDA support in 1992 (Ramachandran:

1995, p. 4). The government of India, despite the externalized funding for internal

projects, exercised administrative control over these initiatives.

Any new program must have a context that it is a response to, but also must

justify, its purpose by referring it to the problems of those programs that have preceded it.

MS succeeded WDP and, although the same bureaucrat was responsible for both, WDP

was instituted only in Rajasthan, whereas MS was instituted in different regions of the

country. Although both programs emphasized empowerment for women, MS had the

mandate to provide education towards such an end, whereas WDP did not. WDP

therefore foregrounded the disempowering effects of illiteracy for women.

Illiteracy prevented women from making sense of the intent of the government, even when its local representatives allegedly agreed to their demands. An officer may verbally agree to the demands of women, yet agree to nothing in writing. In other words, a moment of collective empowerment can be rendered a moment of disempowerment because of an inability to read and write. In WDP, such was the experience of local women, and the program had no provision to redress such a debilitating condition for the women’s movement at the local level.

MS therefore made good on what WDP lacked. It categorically stated, “the

national education system will play a positive, interventionist role in the empowerment of

women” (NPE: 1986, Paragraph 4.2). Among it targets were phased, time-bound

elementary education for girls and women (ages 15-35) and providing them with greater access to vocational, technical, and professional education. To this end, it promised to foster the development of new curricula, textbooks, training and orientation of teachers, decision-makers, administrators, and educational institutions. WDP therefore provided the immediate policy context for a new program to be drafted, and the international conferences filled in the larger context for such an intervention to look meaningful and urgent at the same time.

To summarize, a political statement of purpose is neither the articulation only of the state nor is the state a homogenous entity in the context of globalization. As colonialism set the terms for the relationship between itself and nationalism and between nationalism and women’s movements, neo-liberalism again reconfigured that relationship. Nationalism, as a discourse and strategy, constitutes itself within the prescriptions of an international discourse of economic change. It creates a national space within which contiguous, yet oppositional, agents are brought to participate in projects of governmentality.

The international imperative is strategically used to mobilize a nationalist collaboration between the state and experts and create a time- and context- appropriate policy. More importantly, experimentation in policy making is never removed from the history of planning, including its colonial history. Previous programs and interventions

are considered a matter for charting the “new” course for new planning, but only in terms

of what the previous planning did not accomplish, rather than what it did in problematic ways. Finally, institutionalizing education to empower women, in a reconfiguring economic and political order, only serves to re-institutionalize state power. As it selectively co-opts ideas and agents from a heterogeneous movement towards a programmatic ideal, the state contributes to the fragmentation of a movement and its possibilities. The idea of the movement gets formalized as institutional identities.

The MS program represents another moment, one in which national identity

became contingent on a collaboration with those conversant with the nature of the grassroots. The state, to conduct development within institutional parameters, needed to

enlist grassroots activists. Since movements had become NGOs in some capacity by the

end of the 1980s, the MS-related collaboration facilitated the reproduction of such institutionalization at the level of planning and at the local level (as an NGO or a fully formed development agency). However, the process itself is contentious. To create a

policy, as a process driven by democratic essentials of debate, or then to engraft it in a

local setting, where there is no immediate recognition of the potential of such a project, is

tedious.

Even if it is relatively easy to equate education with empowerment in a national

policy, its implementation is never easy. Implementation has to be preceded by

knowledge production about the setting and the relationships that will facilitate

implementation of a locally specific form of policy. Perceptions and theoretical

understanding of a subject condition does not guarantee a perfect fit between its

articulation and its effects. The articulations of policy need to be renegotiated in the local context and, often, familiar strategies (mobilization) need to be adopted to give the articulation its meaning and therefore the rationale for specific interventions. In other words, the concern of this project is how development, in its local and international configurations, comes loose at the points of local reception in complex ways. The next chapter, however, discusses Chitrakoot, the site of local level ethnographies. It describes the local context from the perspective of the MS program and the women who were recruited at different levels and in different capacities.

CHAPTER 2

INTRODUCTION TO CHITRAKOOT: SITE OF STUDY

The Train to Chitrakoot

As I settled into the air-conditioned (AC) compartment for the Mahakaushal

express at 4:00 p.m. on a warm February evening, I knew that I had a long night ahead.

The Mahakaushal express is the only train that goes to Chitrakoot, now designated as a district in Uttar-Pradesh. It starts from the Nizamuddin Railway Station in West Delhi at

4:20 in the evening and arrives at Chitrakoot at 4:00 a.m. Sleep is always a problem for me on trains. I wish the so-called soothing motions of the train could soothe me, if not everyone else, to sleep. But that has never happened. Because I was traveling alone, I thought that the best idea was to read, which would perhaps make me tired, and then I would sleep before arriving at my destination. However, the destination arrived too early in the morning for me to get a good night’s sleep. The train master was asleep and could not be bothered with waking people before their respective stations. So I would have to keep an eye on my watch and every station that I passed by from 3.00 a.m. onwards. The end result, I knew, would be a tired morning, to which I wasn’t looking forward.

As I had predicted, I sat on my bunk for two hours waiting for the train to arrive at Chitrakoot station. When it did, the station was pitch black. Only the lights from the train illuminated the platform, just enough for me to figure where to get down and make my way to the exit. I had to be careful as I walked because there were many sleeping bodies sprawled across the platform, each waiting for their train at that time of the

morning. I knew the layout of the station and where I could find a rickshaa (tricycle) to

take me to the office of Khabar Lehriya, the women’s newspaper in Chitrakoot. I was

headed there because, apart from being my home for the next 10 days, I also was going to

do a writing workshop for the women journalists. The coordinator for the newspaper

invited me for this purpose. She thought that it would be productive experience for the

group. This also gave me an opportunity to interview women at KL, who had previously

worked with the MS program in different capacities.

A Field of Opportunities

Chitrakoot also provided other opportunities. I had a chance to interview the

former coordinator of MS. She currently heads a local women’s NGO that she started in

the early 1990s. Its primary funding was a catering service. Its initial catering contracts were with MS Banda, but soon the formal relationship ran into troubled waters. The NGO

currently works on women’s issues such as human rights, communalism, water, fair labor

wages, and income-generation projects. Just the day before I reached Chitrakoot, the

NGO had fashioned a padyatra (foot-march) from Allahabad to Chitrakoot to protest the

genocide of Muslims in Gujarat and other similar pogroms that the ruling Hindu

nationalist party was orchestrating in U.P., which has a significant Muslim population. I

was in the NGO office with women from the KL team working on the next issue, when a

man came up the stairs and asked to meet with the coordinator, who was away at the

time. We asked the purpose of his visit. He wanted to know where the padyatra was

headed and where it would end. We declined all knowledge about the progress of the

padyatra. Later we found out that the person was a Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI)

officer and had been to the MS office before.

At 4:00 a.m. on the morning of my arrival in Chitrakoot, however, my thoughts

were only of sleep. As I made my way out of the platform at Chitrakoot, I heard someone say “didi” (MS coordinator). I tried to peer through the darkness, but initially saw only shadows moving. But a minute later, I spotted a very pregnant M and her friend. I was both relieved to see them and distressed about M being there to meet me so early in the morning. My distress expanded into concern as we sat in a rickshaa comfortable only for two. The clouds added to the darkness in the alleyways from the station to the office. The streets were all paved, but were uneven and narrow. The unevenness of the streets made the rickshaa unstable and made me wish that I had put M in a separate rickshaa.

However, our rickshaa driver did well and was able to get us safely to our destination. As I walked into the office with only a smattering of the candlelight to illuminate our path, I saw some early morning activity. Some women were pulling water out of the handpump into buckets for their morning ablutions. Others were already dressed and ready for the day. Here I was, feeling like I wanted to sleep until the afternoon, and there were the women looking sharp and beautiful. It was not yet daylight, so I quickly unpacked my sleeping bag, found a corner, and settled in for a least a couple of hours of sleep. Before I knew it, it was bright and noisy. Someone was shouting and someone was quieting the person. In my semi-awake state, I was registering a critique in that voice—a critique of a city girl’s sleeping habits.

Insider/Outsider: Waking to a Dilemma

Sleep patterns marked a separation between the local and the urban, between the insiders and the outsiders. But there was no resentment, on either side, in such a

distinction. There was playfulness here, but also a way in which the local women asserted

their local identity, their organized ways of doing things. It showed their resilience, their

sense of duty, and their ability to work hard through the day and night. Alternately, we

were seen as guests (outsiders), who must be allowed the luxuries of late sleeping, and as

insiders. According to the women in Banda, my late sleeping was a symptom of urban

living, for which we were shown sympathy. We were not only allowed to sleep late, but

also allowed the luxury of warm water, heated over an earthen stove. We also were

allowed to have a late breakfast (or even a different one) if somehow our stomachs could

not digest spicy rice dishes in the morning. We were, in every way allowed, to keep our

urban habits in a different setting. At the Khabar Lehriya office on that first day of the

KL training, I wanted to sleep for just another hour, but I couldn’t get any shuteye. My

guilty conscience would not allow me to sleep, and I found myself getting up early and

getting ready to take on the day.

Making a Case for and Building a Background to Interviewing

Since my work did not begin for the next two days (a video-training workshop

was still on), I spent some time renewing old acquaintances at KL and at the local NGO

office. I wanted to interview women who were with MS previously as sahelis or

sahyoginis. I wanted the women to decide when they wanted to be interviewed (if at all) and to do so without cutting into their time at work at either location. I was happy to get

scraps of time with them at different times of the day. I was an outsider still, as I had

come back to Chitrakoot after a gap of five years. I had worked with MSK in 1995, but that experience, at this time, did not make me an insider. Yet, bonds that were forged in

moments of intense creativity still existed. There was great warmth between us, but there was also an implicit understanding of our professional priorities.

The women led hectic professional lives. They traveled from village to village to gather their news, collated pieces of information, and met twice in the month at the office to select, revise, and edit the news for the next edition. Thus, my interviews with them were inserted in between their many professional priorities, for which I was both grateful and relieved. My first day in Chitrakoot was about organizing interviews with women, but also quickly became a day to revisit the streets of Chitrakoot, especially as a researcher.

Re-familiarizing Myself with Chitrakoot or Making Chitrakoot Familiar

The main street in the Chitrakoot district branches off into a mesh of smaller streets. The main street is lined with shops of all kinds. It appeared that the number of shops and the quantity of products in the market place had increased dramatically. There were fancy toy and clothes shops, shops that sold soda and ice cream, juice corners, and restaurants and hotels that served everything from sweet lassi (yogurt shake) to Indian- style Chinese food. There also were more jewelry stores than before.

Women in Banda generally wear shiny silver or silver-plated ornaments, which were also sold by the shops. But each shopkeeper had a trough of old silver (coins, jewelry, utensils) that patrons sell or exchange for new silver. For me, the old silver held greater aesthetic and historical value than the new silver, which was always too shiny, too perfect, and too new. The shopkeepers could not help but wonder aloud every time why

we preferred the old silver over the new silver. We often smiled or gave our little spiel about history and aesthetics.

This time around, as I passed one such shop, I asked the rickshaa-puller to let me off. I was suddenly overtaken by the eagerness to see what was “new” in old silver. The shop owner greeted me, even as he continued to stare as if to recognize me somewhere. I immediately recognized him. During my MSK days, we bought old silver from his shop.

While I did not know his name, he said mine aloud. I was stunned at the memory of a shopkeeper, but also disconcerted by his sharpness. As I sat there looking through his trough of old silver, he blurted out that he remembered my name because I owed him 700 rupees from five years ago. He reminded me that I had bought a silver choker from him, but asked to pay for it on the next trip. But the next trip did not materialize because I left within two weeks of getting an offer of admission from a university in Chicago. I paid my debt and as I left the shop to my waiting rickshaa, I could only smile at the memory of a businessman.

My smile died as I saw the traffic jam the main street. I looked around helplessly at the rickshaa-wala, asking him if it was always this bad in the afternoon. Our man, a seasoned rider on the streets of Chitrakoot, admitted that it was. He pointed out that the train line intersects the main street. The gates are closed every time the train passes through and that causes a traffic jam on the main street. When the gates open, the same traffic then spills over in an organized fashion. People on scooters, motorcycles, cycles, and rickshaas try to weave around the buses, trucks, bullock carts, and tractor-trailers.

They miss seriously hurting themselves as they race their vehicles within a foot of a bullock cart or a loaded truck.

I actually saw a young boy on a Hero brand bicycle trying to unstably make his way between a bus and a bullock cart that was loaded with sugarcane. He had one hand on the handle of his cycle and the other was slapping the side of the slow moving bus so as to maintain his balance. Suddenly, the bus, instead of inching, shot forward as if the driver had found that opening in the traffic. The young man lost his balance and crashed into the side of the bullock cart. Suddenly the main street was the center of another spectacle. Some bystanders rushed to see whether the boy was okay and helped him up; others just stood around as spectators. This incident added to the chaos and to the traffic jam that now seemed unending. But my most resourceful rickshaa-wala was able to take advantage of the commotion, find a space to maneuver his rickshaa and whisk me away to my destination.

The afternoon sun was beating down on the town. The panwalas (betel-leaf sellers), in their makeshift shelters on the side of the road, were wiping the sweat off of their brows with a cheese cloth and using it to swat away the flies on the bundles of paan.

The mithai-walas (sweet sellers) were doing the same in their shops. Someone was even throwing water on to the street. This settled the dust and cooled the roads. It was a school day, and children of all ages and heights, dressed in their school uniforms, were walking back from school. Some boys were jousting, hitting each other with short punches. Some girls were walking separately from the boys. There was no jousting or loud speech among them, and they walked with drooped shoulders, but with eyes fixed on the direction of the

road. Their short giggles were interspersed with hushed conversations conducted in each other’s ears.

While the boys looked disheveled, the girls looked as crisp as morning in their salwar-kurtaa-dupatta ensembles. I saw some of the girls stop at the carts that sold chaat

(spicy fruit salads) and golgappas (spicy water-filled flour puffs), and I was tempted to do the same. But the water in the golgappas specifically, and in Banda in general, was a problem. I suffered water poisoning more than a few times. I had resisted the idea of carrying a special filtering glass to Chitrakoot because I knew that I would be embarrassed drinking from it, especially when the women around me were drinking

“regular” water. But then did I want to be permanently stationed in the bathroom, in a most uncomplimentary position? Was I willing to risk permanent damage to my stomach for the sake of a slightly displaced politics? In this world of imploding caste, class, and urban-rural divides, living like the people I work with can result in chronic and even terminal diseases, and I no longer wanted to subject myself to this risk.

Caste dynamics around water are still important to consider and reflect upon for a researcher such as myself. In MS, it was possible to get away with having one’s own urban idiosyncrasies, even though one was the target of serious bantering about it. In the context of the village, however, when our interactions were with low caste women, whose central water source was a well and a lake that is overgrown with weeds and has fungus floating on top, how does one negotiate the simple issue of whether to accept their offer of drinking water? If I have to say no, then how do I say it without feeding into the issue of caste? How does one convey the thought that the reason for declining “their

water” is not because it is theirs, but because my stomach cannot weather its untreated rawness? If sources of water are distributed along caste lines, where caste also limits access to such sources, what does my “no” mean within such a social configuration? It can and has meant reactions such as “Why didi? Why wouldn’t you drink our water?

Maybe because you have come from outside and there the water is better than ours. Even

in the Pradhan’s house (the village headman are generally of higher caste), you will find

the same water.” Every other time that I declined water in the village, I decided to be

honest in my reasons. I told the hosts that I was carrying my own water for health

reasons. Yet, I remained afraid of how that moment could destroy my credibility as a

researcher and as a feminist with local women.

K: MSK Student and Khabar Lehriya2 Correspondent

Introduction

K started her educational and professional journey with MSK in 1995. K always

conducted herself with dignity and spoke with great politeness and regard for everyone.

As such, it was easy to notice and admire her. She was always the most hardworking of her batch of fellow students. K has a high school degree now and plans to take the exams

to become a college teacher. She is currently a journalist with KL and seems to enjoy her

2 Khabar Lehriya is a women’s monthly newspaper run exclusively by women who were either part of MS/MSK or have shown special skills in collecting and writing news that is gender-sensitive. The newspaper is written in the Bundeli language. It was launched in May 2003 under the aegis of two NGOs, one Delhi based and the other based in Chitrakoot. The women are paid a stipend as correspondents and their fare to wherever they need to travel for the purpose of work and meetings. Everyone meets at the office of the newspaper in Chitrakoot once a month. They share their news, make selections for the upcoming edition, edit different written versions of the news items selected and create a final draft that is then sent to Allahabad (an important city in U.P.) for printing. When the printed copies arrive from Allahabad, the women collect and sell them in their villages. One (4-sided) copy of KL costs one rupee and fifty paise (2003-04).

job. She decided to come one morning for breakfast at the place where I was staying, and that is how this interview occurred.

Education and the Anti-woman

My father did not approve of my studies. But as soon as he left for the fields, I would finish all the housework and then go attend the village center. The center in my village existed for the longest time. Here we were taught how to write our names and the name of our village. Banda kii Batiyana (Tales of Banda) was our textbook (the language primer). But somehow my father came to know that I went to the center without his knowledge. He was very angry and shouted at me many times. So when didi asked my father to let me attend MSK in Karwi, he declined. I was stubborn and, instead, I got permission from my mother and decided to go to Karwi with didi. The next day, when I returned home, there was much discussion about my visit to Karwi. My parents were very angry and refused to acknowledge that I had been selected to attend MSK. My father argued that I was of marriageable age and that he couldn’t really trust anyone at MSK.

The people in the village added their voice to his misgivings. Despite assurances from didi that nothing would happen and that we would be taken care of, the people in my village were still skeptical.

I went against everyone and enrolled in MSK. My parents came to see me almost every weekend. Savitri was my friend in MSK and her uncle also came to visit often. One day, he decided to withdraw her from the school. We both cried a lot. My parents also wanted me to go back home with them. I wanted to continue, but my father’s condition was that we ask permission of my in-laws. He said that he had sown the field (brought me

up). He added that he had to watch out his daughter’s security because the world is not

trust-worthy.

My in-laws gave their permission, so I was saved! After MSK, I finished class five and six. I was going to take my class six exams when my gauna3 was proposed. I

knew that if my gauna happened, I would not be able to study. So again there was a

discussion with my in-laws in which we had to agree that, despite my gauna, I would

continue with my studies. My in-laws agreed to this as well. Later, I passed my class six, seven, eight, and nine. I think I passed because of MSK and my own hard work. I don’t think that MSK was special, but its methods were different than regular schools.

Teaching with pictures and involving students in different activities was very helpful in my retaining all the information.

In schools, the master (generally a male teacher) writes numbers on the board. But in MSK, pieces of roti were used and addition and subtraction with numbers was taught

through those pieces. Sometimes even matchsticks were used. There is an earth-sky

difference between MSK and regular schools. In the regular school, the master comes to

the board, writes what he wants to write, and then leaves. If the students have questions

in their minds, then some get to ask and others don’t. In MSK, there were open

discussions between teachers and students and if you wanted to ask something a thousand

times, you could do that without being scolded. In school, we were taught from books. In

MSK, there also were books, but our lessons were handwritten for us in big letters so that

we could easily read them.

MSK increased my self-confidence, which later helped me survive the regular

schools. I want to teach. There is an exam for teachers and, once you pass that, then you

can teach in the schools. I want to teach in a college and also do social work. I want to

work with women, especially those who are oppressed. If a girl wants to study, then I can

use myself as an example and talk to her about my experience in MSK. I can tell her how

to move ahead in life like I did.

From Landed to Landless: The Dynamic of Indebtedness and Female Work

(Tell me a bit about Kunjanpurwah [K’s maternal home]. Were you born there?)

Yes, I was born here. My father owned a lot of agricultural land then, about 30 to 35

acres. But he gambled away most of it. He was lured into gambling by the upper castes.

When we had land, I helped in the fields. I accompanied my mother during the harvesting and threshing seasons. We also had paid labor then, who worked on the farms. They were given wages according to the bigha (one-fourth of a hectare) they harvested or threshed.

They were given 6 rupees (Indian currency) per each bigha they harvested. (Did you ever feel they were given lower wages?) This was not less. The wages were given according to the bigha that was threshed. Women did the harvesting, but not the men. The women also transplanted rice, but not the men. They had to do this the whole day. When I would see the women hard at work, standing in knee deep water planting the rice seedlings, I would automatically join in. But I never worked a whole day. I would work for three to four

hours and then would have to head home to look after my siblings.

MS/MSK: Building Contexts for Feminist Empathy

3 It is the ceremony when a married girl comes of age and is formally sent to her husband’s house by her

(Do you think that MS has helped change women’s situation or status?) In the

places that the MS was functional, there has been a change, whether it is with regard to

wages for women, violence, or asserting women’s right to have forest produce. Many

people have become enlightened. Despite all the work that already has been done for

women, there is much that still needs to be done. (Do you feel that a program like this must go on?) If there are programs like these, only then can there be awareness in society and it can move forward. People still ask why MS and also MSK closed down. We really

don’t know.

Now there are many different organizations that are doing education work with

women and girls, but I think there is no soch (thought) behind it. They don’t know how to link education to women’s real life issues. In MSK, there was always an open discussion about the rights of women and girls in their marriage, family, and community. We were made aware of our rights, even as we were informed about different issues. (What has changed in you after MSK?) I have changed a lot. MSK gave me the courage to move outside in the world. Earlier, I couldn’t go outside the house without my parents’ permission. Now I do what I please and come and go whenever I please. My husband used to be suspicious about me. So I asked him to come see for himself what I do. He then understood. Now I am free. He and everyone in his family know that I work at a sanstha (organization).

(Do you feel that, after MSK, you can identify with women more, empathize with them more?) Yes, definitely. When I first went to stay with my husband’s parents, I knew

parents. 64

nothing about my mother-in-law. I didn’t know what to expect from her. The people in the village often told me that my saas (mother-in-law) was the nicest person. She never fought with anyone. She ate what she got. Sometimes if there was no food, then she would go without eating. She would do mazdoori (paid labor) for the sake of her children, while her husband just wandered around doing nothing. He would gamble and sell things in the house to pay off his debts. He sold her anklets and any other jewelry he could lay his hands on.

Once during Holi (the Hindu festival of color), there was nothing to eat. So my saas went to do mazdoori without anyone knowing. My aunt told me later and I felt so sad about it. So I decided never to let her do mazdoori again. My saas is like my mother. I promised to make her life as easy as possible from then on. She too has given me a lot of love. She deserves all my respect right now. I also have two sister-in-laws. One is married and the other one lives with us. We are like sisters. Whenever I come back from the office, she will search through my bag. She knows that I never go home without getting her something. This has become a habit and I don’t like disappointing her. I teach her sometimes. I want her to do well in school.

MS/MSK and Reforming Marriage as a Relationship

(What is your relationship with your husband?) I have a good relationship. There were no fights earlier on, but now we fight over my work and coming back late from work. I have the burden of running the household, although he contributed too when he was working. But now he is not doing anything. Three months have gone by. I feel so

irritated. I feel that I have to do all the work and he just sits and eats? I am as human as he is. I ask him why he can’t be sensitive to me.

(Why don’t they work? Even your sasur [father-in-law] doesn’t?) He says that he can’t find anything. That is a lie. If he tries, why can’t he find work? If there is a desire to do something, then that desire can take you places. I had bought my husband the “pheri”

(vegetable cart) and also gave him the money to set it up. But he gave it up after only a few days. Now he wants to go outside of Karwi to look for work. I don’t know what he has in mind. He doesn’t do anything the whole day. Either he just sits around or wanders around the village. My saas and sasur complain to me that, when I go to work, their son doesn’t stay at home. He even comes back late and we have no idea where he has been. I have to deal with all this every day. Despite all this, however, he has never raised his hand to me or even shouted at me. This is to his credit, but right now I am sick of handling all the responsibilities in the family. I do what I can, but I feel sad that, if he is an able human being, then why he doesn’t do what he should?

(Have you helped out in your maykaa [maternal home] too?) I have two sisters and two brothers and both are younger than I am. No one is married yet. She is finishing high school. I have told my parents not to let her marry yet. My father now says that it is up to me to make the decision for her. They will do what I say. (Why do they regard you so?) They see now how much education has helped me move ahead in life. They are happy that their daughter has done well in life. They never thought that this would happen. I never thought that this would happen. But it has.

Education and a Learner’s Agency: An Analysis

Here, the learner is concerned with the third level of institutionalization of a program—a school for women and girls like herself. She first elaborates on the structural

(social and cultural) constraints to female/her education in the Banda district. A school for women and girls did not exist, and girls beyond a particular age did not enroll in regular schools. Parents and communities deployed gender-based cultural norms to control women’s bodies, yet harness their productive and reproductive potential towards the perpetuation of these norms. Schooling, it was feared, created the anti-woman. She would learn to question norms rather than direct or re-direct her behavior according to these norms. The unquestioned practice of gender norms became the framework for parents and the community, irrespective of a personal belief in the importance and power of education, and resulted in the denial of the opportunity to attend MSK.

Denial and acceptance, however, are negotiable categories. An unquestioned practice of norms, in the face of an opportunity, can be questioned as a matter of singular, personal choice. The MSK provided the moment for which this learner could articulate her own desires vis à vis the intervention, while also positing a question about the normalized exclusion of women from education, which was sustained through cultural prescriptions on the life of a woman. She shows, as a dialogue between her parents and herself, how a possibility can be used by women to become their own agents to achieve particular ends. As such, an intervention can foster agency, and its existence cannot be denied in the name of norms and normative structures. The learner articulates well how

women constantly theorize their own existential dilemmas and can use opportunities to

address these accordingly.

Next, the learner elaborates on her own participation within MSK, a participation

that also can be defined as one harnessed towards institutionalizing education. As she

questions and negotiates with her parents, as repositories of cultural norms, to access an

opportunity such as MSK, she also participates in the latter’s formalization as an

institution. This learner was recruited by the first MSK in 1995, where the only

“structural component” (that which identified its physical existence) was a stone building with an iron gate. The curriculum was developed as it was transacted and vice versa. A learner-centered approach to learning has stayed with this learner. She remembers the absence of fear and encouragement for critical thinking and questioning of concepts. She appreciates such educational strategies as larger fonts in written materials to ease their reception by neo-literates. She acknowledges that the nature of pedagogical strategies fostered her agency and success as a learner in institutional realms beyond the MSK.

Finally, the learner identifies the personal and social effects of her participation in the institution in its formative life. MSK marked educational, and resulted in professional, success for the learner. She has passed high school and now wants a college degree that can help her become a teacher. She also works for a local women’s newspaper as a correspondent. She wants to work hard to sustain the paper as well as her own livelihood through it, in the meantime. Her financial independence is directly connected to her unrestricted mobility across spaces and time. She has no regret about questioning her husband’s lack of responsibility for her and his family. She even

questions his authority in questioning the nature of her work or why she works late and for days at end. She demonstrates empathy with her mother-in-law, however, and understands the history of her travails and resolves to heal her memories by refusing to let her work for wages. She wants community with women and finds it in her nature and in her MSK training to foster such a collectivity. The learner is therefore the “poster girl” for institutionalized education with a gender bias.

Her agency, however, is not a perfect agency, constructed perfectly in an experimental space. It is also an institutionalized agency that is circumscribed as much by the nature of information as by the simulated space of its production. A learner may want to read, write, and know more about the phenomenon of day and night, a topic that she has seen in her brother’s school textbook, and less about sati or widow burning. For a learner, then, education is replicating an experience that they have been excluded from for a long time. It is not about questioning or reforming the discourses and structures that maintain such exclusion. When such questioning is initiated by those who are perceived to be in charge of the intervention, the women choose to participate. They participate because such participation generates fundamental questions about womanhood in the local context and vis à vis manifest versions of patriarchal cruelty against it.

But fundamental questions require fundamental and radical answers; if sati is murder, then sati must be denounced in any form anywhere and legal charges must be brought against its perpetrators. The women want education to raise their status within family and community and not exclude them from such a protective, even if exploitative, fold. Just like the learner preferred to explain her reasons for enrolling in MSK to her

parents and finally generated their assent for it, the learner also learns to negotiate tricky intellectual and existential questions within the institutional space of a school. In both ways, she learns to articulate ideas precisely and selectively, carefully balancing her identities in different institutional settings and also maintaining institutional integrity in the process.

The learner knows that education can open possibilities for her professional

success that, in turn, can assist her in engaging with the world from a position of power.

Using education to question power, however, also can lead to exclusion and rejection. As

such, critique can be empowering in that it locates the sites of oppression for our perusal,

but its constant operationalization in real life can result in the denial of access to sources

and institutions of power, especially if survival is contingent upon these institutions

rather than on the program. As long as the learners could show that the new knowledge

was more “scientific,” that it questioned beliefs about the natural world rather than the

cultural terrain, the school served its purpose in the eyes of the social community.

The same learner once filed a police report against an incident of bride burning in

her own village. She and her family were threatened with dire consequences by the

perpetrators. The same family turned on her and her education for breeding an environment of social disharmony and angst. What this incident shows is that MSK and

its education for women was legitimate, as long as social hierarchies remained

unquestioned. The school became problematic when its learners made interventions

against the gendered violence of such hierarchies. In the absence of a consciously created

collective within MSK that would survive outside of institutional boundaries, the learner

soon learned to de-politicize the nature of her education and, instead, use it to practical

purposes such as her livelihood.

MSK produced a new woman who was trained and empowered to seek out new

avenues for economic sustenance within the social terrain. They also possessed the

necessary intellectual wherewithal to question lived realities or even to change them

through group mobilization but learned that they could not exercise it. The MSK learner

thus is an example of a subject whose agency is fractured through her participation in the institution. For this particular learner, schooling confused her pre-existing agency. She exhibited a strong self when she expressed her desire to study and in her ability to argue her case with her parents. Schooling, however, served only to normalize such agency towards keeping sacrosanct personal and social relationships. Schooling empowered her to be economically productive but such a productive capacity only served to increase the burden of responsibility on her.

To summarize, for the learner, empowerment was freedom to move in public places, exercise economic independence, question spousal apathy towards familial responsibilities, and demonstrate empathy towards women in the family and outside. It was the economic and intellectual wherewithal that empowered her to question her apathetic and chronically unemployed husband. Her husband, however, can reform himself through the force of his own will and not that of his wife. The wife’s conscientization or intellectual wherewithal only added to her double burden. At the cost of her mental and physical health, she took on the burden of servicing the varying needs of family members in different households.

MSK had attracted strong and willful women, women who could argue their way

into the school and did. MSK, however, tamed these willful women to become

responsible citizens who could perform their duties for their families and community,

without questioning them as the sites of their continued exploitation at multiple levels,

but principally economic. MSK also produced educated and skillful individuals, but not a

collective of women who shared a common purpose. Therefore, each learner found herself without a network and was left alone to fight violence, for example, in their

homes. Institutionalized education then re-institutionalized gender and gender-based

performance of social responsibilities. Such an education produced articulate women who

could identify the sites of their exploitation, but could not use the information to wage a collective battle against them.

Individuality was enhanced by such an education, especially as it made women

economically viable, but at the cost of a collective with an identified purpose. Structured

inequalities that only a collective can question and reform were instead buffered in and

through the economic capabilities of individual women. These individual women, while

being able to empathize with women in their immediate families, were too burdened by their earning responsibilities to orchestrate a movement for social change. In institutionalizing education, the mandate of the program—to empower women to question and change their lived realities—was left unrealized.

CHAPTER 3

INSTITUTIONALIZING EDUCATION AND TEACHING A CURRICULUM:

THE SAHELIS’ EXPERIENCES

A: Dreams of Matrimony and Existential Realities

I know A and P (discussed later) from our days at MSK, a six-month intensive

curriculum training school for adult women in the city of Karwi in Banda. The school

began in January 1995, and I met A for the first time in January 1995. She had a childlike

face and a childlike infectious enthusiasm for everything. She worked as a shikshikaa

(teacher) in one of the centers before she was picked up to teach in the first MSK in

Karwi. She looked nervous at our first curriculum meeting. However, she was not afraid

to ask the questions that would help her to understand what was expected of her and how

she could best perform. It was easy to be friends with her, as she liked to chat about

everything. Often, after a long day and night of work, A and I would walk around the

school courtyard, talking about our respective lives. Our deep fondness for each other has

persisted and enabled us to reconnect in this new space and time (2002-03).

Currently, A heads the human rights office of a local NGO. There is an air of

confidence and maturity about her that was nice to see. It was in this NGO that we pulled out our respective chairs and began our interview. She was all smiles at the prospect of being interviewed. When she saw the tape recorder, her smile broadened and she eagerly awaited my questions. The interview situation made her feel like an important person because it is generally the politicians or government officials who are interviewed and

their words printed. A felt on par with them and that was exciting to her. As soon as I said, “tell me about your life,” and switched on the tape recorder, she began.

I got married in 1992. I was studying then. When my gauna happened in 1993, I was 17 years old. From the beginning, my dream was to work and I knew that I did not want to sit at home. I knew this because I had seen the hardships at home. My maykaa was very poor. I thought that maybe I would get a good sasuraal (husband’s home) and then would not have to work. But when I saw my sasuraal (it was in Bhageru village, about 80 km. from Karwi and situated in what is referred to as the dacoit region), I was very upset. There were no schools or colleges there. To study further or get a job, I knew that I had to get out.

I had an aunt, who was a sahyogini (supervisor) with MS. She used to take care of the Tindwari block. I asked her to let me know if there was work for me. She then told me that there were literacy centers in different villages and that I could teach in one of them, if I wanted. Soon after, I started teaching at the center in Tindwari. I ran one center there and also lived there. I got my mother to stay with me because my husband stayed in

Bhageru. I didn’t take his advice before joining the center as a shikshikaa. I didn’t want him to say no and then stop me from leaving. I had to work outside of my sasuraal, and that was important to me. If my husband came with me, then that would be okay and, if not, that was okay too. I did what I wanted to do.

(So why didn’t you like your sasuraal?) The way I had imagined it to be wasn’t how it was at all. (What kind of dream did you have? That you would not be poor anymore?) I did not dream of a beautiful man. I just wanted a good prosperous home. I

wanted to live well as a wife. But that didn’t happen. Then my husband also went away

to work in Surat (an industrial town in Madhya-Pradesh, the Central Indian state) and

didn’t come back. I was paid Rs. 250 a month at the center and I stayed in a one-room house. My mother came to stay with me. Sometimes my sasuraal would send me some money and grains. My husband used to send money orders too. In the centers, I used to teach for two hours every day. I provided information about health. If there was a fight among the women, I would intervene and try to resolve the issue with them. I also would try to provide some legal advice if the fight concerned a serious matter. But I would take the help of the sahyogini then.

I went to Delhi for training in curriculum. (How did you feel about the training?) I

went there for the first time and learned about how to develop a curriculum. It was good.

It was all new, and there was so much to learn. In MSK, we had to develop the lessons,

but in the centers, they were all readymade. There was “Banda ki Batiyaan” and “Nayi

Kiran” (both language primers) that we used. I did not have to develop a lesson for the

day. It was like, today, I have to start “namak” (salt) (or learning language through

words) and when that is done, do the next word. We went really slowly with the lessons.

In MSK, we had to develop a lesson from a particular subject area and also write a student activity based on it. In MSK, I used to be very scared. I didn’t know how to teach there. The center was different. There you had to read and teach from what was already there. I would teach for two to three hours in the center, but in MSK there were time stipulations. In the center, it was fun because nobody was there to see you or ask questions. Well, from the perspective of the center, there was nobody to keep track of

you. People (generally the sahyoginis) would go in every 15 days to check on the centers, but not every day. In MSK, however, I realized my own capacity to work hard. My information (about everything) increased. I became very self-dependent and learned how to say and do everything with confidence.

Professional and Personal Fears: Strategies for Overcoming Them

(So how did your fear disappear?) The fear was about giving out wrong information to the students. We used to get feedback outside of the class and when we were told that we taught well, I would feel that I finally knew something. Slowly, teaching every day helped erase my fears. Also, I had more information now and that added to my confidence. Up until 1995, my husband had told me that he couldn’t come live with me. He first said that had had to wait until his sister’s wedding was finalized.

But even when the gauna happened, he did not show up. Then I wrote him a letter in

1995, telling him that he needed to decide very quickly. My marriage didn’t seem like a marriage at all. I had to face a lot of hardships. When my husband finally came to see me, we ended up fighting a lot. He kept needling me by saying that I was incapable of having children. He was also a suspicious type. If I talked with someone, he would object. He used to scold me a lot. One day he pulled my cheek very hard and even beat me.

I complained to didi and she tried to make him understand how bad it was to beat one’s own wife. Then I knew that if he did not get the danda (stick), he would never change. Didi set him right. Ever since our son Anshu was born, everything has been fine.

Now it doesn’t seem like he is the same Hari (husband’s name) as before. Now that we have a son, he seems to have settled down. He has that “dehaatii soch” (traditional way of

thinking) that not having children is inauspicious. He would use words like “baajhin” and

“panda” (infertile) to hurt me. But then MSK closed. Hari mentioned going back to Surat

if we couldn’t find any work here. We could have gone and worked in the factory there.

Then I talked to MK didi and when she knew that MSK was closing, she called me. I told didi the same thing. I needed to work and, if not here, then somewhere else. But then I got the job with the local NGO here.

Education or Schooling: The Case of Routinizing Curriculum Instruction

(So in MSK, there was a lot of fun and games?) Yes, but later I began to feel suffocated. Our information was now limited. It wasn’t increasing. Everything was closed down. No one came from outside to provide input between 1998 and 1999. There were no activities. There were no trainers. I was in the kishori kunj (school for girls) and that was now in the village. MSK was in Karwi. Absolutely different rules came into force.

We got only one holiday during the week. You had to teach a class at 6:00 a.m. and that was very hard. So I told myself that I just had to grit my teeth and do this. So when the schools closed, I started working at a local NGO. There is lot of work here. There is a lot of responsibility too. Here, if a case comes to the office and is serious, we have to go there, and sometimes many hours can be spent dealing with it.

(Can you say that you have changed as a result of MSK, MS? How?) Yes, I have the courage to speak. My opinion has become important to everyone in my house. This wasn’t true before. I am like the guardian of the house now. People feel that because I earn money, this entitles me to such a position of power. Hari earns too, but my opinion

is given more weight. Now anything that is to be done has to go through me. I really

enjoy this.

Hari has also taken a lot of responsibility for the house on himself. He takes care

of the children, takes care of their food and medicines. He also takes care of the guests

who may drop by. When I get home after the end of the day I get cooked food. If I get

home at 10.00 at night, then, you tell me, do I make food? Before, I would go home, and

if there was no food, then I would not offer to make it. We would all sleep without eating.

He understood what I was trying to convey to him. So the next time, he had food ready

for both of us. Now our work is divided. If I make food in the morning, then he makes

food in the evening. If I mold the flour, then he cooks the chapattis. If I cut the

vegetables, then he will grind the masala for it. The best thing is that my in-laws say

nothing. They are good to me. My father-in-law comes here to see us and he doesn’t

think it is bad that his bahu (daughter-in-law) earns a living and that his son has become a

homemaker. I recently complained to my father-in-law that Hari sometimes scolds me.

He scolded Hari for me.

(In MSK you say that you got information—how was this information better or

different than anything you got before?) I never got information like this before. I didn’t

remember much from my school days. Here, education was more practical. In school, the

masterji never used to teach us this way. You understood what you could. Nobody really

helped you. Here, at MSK, we had to develop the curriculum ourselves, write it in a

simple language, and used it in a practical way. We also had to think about activities

related to the curriculum. What I learned in MSK also helped me in my studies. I have

completed high school and half of the topics for my exam were from the MSK

curriculum. I wanted to study further, but for the past two years my studies have stopped

because I built this house and had children. But I will try again (to study further).

Blaming a Program or Evaluating a Dependency

(How do you feel about MS leaving Banda? Another saheli said yesterday that

MS has exploited people like you and her). In 1999, we were told that MS would wrap up

in Banda. But we had been hearing that since 1998, and every year the program had stayed. So I didn’t think that MS would close up shop. I felt that MS probably would not close until August 1, 2001 and, in fact, I believed that MS would not close at all because there was so much demand for it. But then it did close. They did not think about us or about setting us up in other jobs, somewhere else. (Didn’t we all know that MS would leave after 10 years and that no guarantees would be given to anyone for jobs? Then why did we put so much hope on a transient program? Just because the program gave us a job we thought that it would give us more work or set us up somewhere? Why?) We always knew that the program would close. But the biggest thing was that it didn’t close. Even

when it was about to close down, I don’t know why I had the belief that they would think

about us. Because of what the program was, we didn’t think that the program would leave

us hanging, as if in the middle of the river. Someone would think about us.

(But what a program does or doesn’t do depends on who is running it? Did other

people who came later to the program have any idea of what the program was about?)

The biggest problem was that the program became totally sarkarii (governmentalized). In

MS, if you came at 10:00 a.m., then you left at 5:00 p.m., and the gates to the office were

locked thereafter. Everything had to be put in writing. This meant that even if you did or didn’t do the work you had to turn in the appropriate forms, duly filled in. These forms became the markers of performance. The registers, progress reports, everything had to be completed, even if you didn’t do the work. Statistics were asked for a lot, and they became very important in the program. So people provided them even if they were all wrong.

Many of the old teachers left the MSK. The new teachers who were appointed had no understanding of the feminist way of thinking, they had no field experience, no experience of even working in a woman’s program. They were now directly appointed from Lucknow (where the MS head office was), rather than from the local groups. I was the only one who was left in MSK. So, suddenly, I had too much responsibility. I used to feel very agitated. If some mistake happened, then I was selected to be reprimanded. I didn’t like the new coordinator at all. She never could understand anything. She talked her sarkarii talk. No one cared to hear us out; they were right and we were wrong. This was another way to throw us out. Before this, MS was a different program. We were asked our opinions, what we wanted to do, and why. Now the head of the program decided everything. She just followed orders from the top.

Social Context, Cultural Norms, and Empowerment

(At this point P, another of the early MSK teachers, intervened with her perspectives on empowerment and the MS program) Didi, I am not saying that we are not empowered. But we have to see everything. We have to see the family, society, everything. Yes, we critique society because we think we know what the problems are

there. But even after that, we cannot do a lot of things that we think we can. As far as

today is concerned, there are a lot of things that I wouldn’t do. I don’t know how things

change tomorrow. No, there is no pressure. No one stops me from doing anything that I

want to do. But I cannot fight the whole society. I have certain responsibilities towards

my family and I will abide by them.

(But you also have to see that so many times you thought that you would kill yourself because of the life you had, but that didn’t happen). That is big to me. That I collected myself, changed my life, and moved on. That, in itself, is empowerment. Is it not? Yes, I think that is empowerment. I am also saying that today I can tell myself that I am very capable. Men don’t scare me. If today we gender training with the men, and this

is a small example, the men ask, “you are a single woman and how come you are giving

this training to men all by yourself?” This shows how far I have come through MS. In the

gender training, I was explaining everything openly, I was talking to them openly, and

answering their questions without fear. I have the courage to talk to men openly. If you

keep someone locked in a room, and then take the person out, then how could that person know what life is like outside of that room? This is what MS did—unlocked us from our

prison. I had only two realities—my in-laws’ and parents’ places. How a girl lives in her

parents’ place and in her sasuraal were the only two realities and there was nothing

beyond that. MS changed that for me.

M: A Subaltern Among Subalterns

I met M briefly at MSK in 1995. She had come one morning to do a short session

on origami (paper craft) with the MSK girls. She is a petite girl-woman, with a rather

small face and a receding hairline. Her clothes hid a body that was nothing more than

skin that was stretched tightly across her thin bones. She looked like an emaciated doll

that could break at any moment. Everyone around her berated her for her thinness and

worried for her survival in the event that she got married and had children.

I met M again in 2003. She was pregnant with her second child. She had a one-

year-old daughter, Fiza. Fiza was born after M’s first child miscarried. Everyone told M

that she should have waited to have her second child by at least two years. Her body was

weak from her miscarriage and the birth of her first daughter. She blamed her husband for

her current pregnancy, but also promised that she would have her “operation” done after

her second child was born. M is an interesting person. She is too eager to please people

around her. Even in her advanced pregnancy, she would offer to lift buckets of water or

walk to the bazaar to get vegetables. She would be the first to volunteer for any kind of

work. We had to often ignore or turn down her offers of help. We even suggested to her

that she stop being so eager because, despite her good intentions, she needed to be selfish for the sake of her unborn child. So I knew that M would not decline my offer for an interview. But I also did not want her to spend her time with me when she should be concentrating on the production of the next edition of Khabar Lehriya. So I suggested to her that, whenever she had some time free, during which she could chat with me, then and only then, should she come look for me or let me know. I also didn’t want to tire her out. She needed her rest. This interview was done during her breaks during the 15 days of workshop.

MS: Recruiting a Financial Need

(How did you learn about the MS program?) Didi, I used to knit sweaters before. I used to go to the bazaar and the way to my house was through the same street that the MS office was on. It was in Ramesh colony. One day, my friend Phulmatiya and I had gone to get wool for the sweaters and we passed the gali (street) in front of the MS office. We saw some women and girls playing outside. We stopped to see what kind of “shunt- baazi” (antics) they were doing. We were wondering what the older women were doing by playing outside like this. We had never seen anything like this before in Banda. We stood that day for hours just watching what new things were being done there and then would make excuses to pass by the gali almost everyday in case more of the same was happening. Then one day, Satyabhama didi saw us and called us over. She asked me where I stayed and how much I had studied. She told me that if they had a need for me, then they would call me, and she took my address. Soon I was called to MS. I learned painting there. (So what kind of training was happening in MS?) I learned painting and origami there. I didn’t consider them training. I didn’t even know then what the word meant then. I considered it all work. I also didn’t know what was meant by evaluations. I was even more confused when didi took my interview and called it an evaluation.

(Why were you in need of work?) My father was ill at that time. My mother and I used to run the household. I could make one sweater in two days. People would give us the wool and we would then make sweaters for them. The people knew about us. I would tell my neighbor that I do this and then she told her friend and, in this way, everyone in the mohalla (neighborhood) knew about us. For a full sweater I took Rs. 60. I made all kinds of sweaters—children, adults, every size. I could make a coat-type sweater or any

design that people wanted. I can’t say how much I made in a month. The money that I got would then be spent on groceries. I didn’t keep a hisab (expense sheet). I have passed class eight and have been in Karwi for a long time. My parents and grandparents are all from here. They sold vegetables such as onions, gourds, and tomatoes. Both my grandfather and father were vendors. After I was born, bapu (father) got married again.

He was never a great father. He never pampered me. Even when I went to the chauraha

(the town center market) with him, he would never buy me anything.

Low Castes and even Lower Castes: Intersections of Caste and Religion

I continued to knit sweaters after I joined the MS. They gave me Rs. 750 per month, without telling me how to spend or not spend it. I continued to knit, but now I have given it up. I don’t have the time. After having training in painting and origami, I became a saheli. I was given the “jamadaar basti” (sweeper caste neighborhood). There were many bastis in the Harijan community, but I worked with the ones who cleaned public latrines. I liked working in the basti. But my family had problems with it.

Whenever I came back from the basti after teaching, I would have to change my clothes.

My mother would say, “here is the water, wash yourself and change your clothes.” I asked my mother why she was being that way. But she would scream at me and be abusive. So I would have to change; otherwise, she would not let me enter the house.

(Why did you continue working?) I wanted to work in the basti because when the residents of the basti came back from work, they would bathe before their lesson. Their hygiene is what I liked a lot. Compared to my own house, their houses were always spotless. The floors were so shiny that you felt like taking a nap there. I used to drink

water there, eat at their house. The only thing I didn’t eat was meat. They caught the

street pigs and cooked their meat. I didn’t feel like eating that. I still have a relationship

with that community. They send me cards inviting me to the marriages in their family and

I do the same. They came for my wedding. When the people from my sasuraal learned

that they were jamadaars, they said, “bahu, do you drink the water touched by them?” I

was hesitant because I had just come here and if I told them the truth, then they could

throw me out of the house. I was scared. So I said that yes, they came, but out of

“vyavhaar” (courtesy) nothing else. They only came to give some shagun (auspicious

offerings) and wish me well. But they were still very skeptical.

(What is your caste?) Kunjara. There are many castes among the Muslims too.

Kunjaras are those who sell vegetables. But it was considered bad to be called Kunjara, so the young people started calling themselves Raiin. I don’t think that Kunjara is a bad

word, but people consider it a very tattered and torn word. In Raiin, maybe, they find

more flexibility in pronunciation and maybe the word sounds nice when you speak it. The

meanings of the two words are the same because they are referring to the same caste and

same jobs. Raiin, I think, may have come from the outside. But I don’t know the whole

history of the word. Now every caste is selling vegetables, but initially it was the

Kunjaras who sold vegetables.

(When the Harijans said, “wait, let us take a bath before teaching us,” did they

know your caste?) They knew, but they considered me the higher caste. I had such

problems. I asked them for water and they would say, “there is a tap outside; go drink

from there.” I kept pleading with them. But they wouldn’t serve me water. So one day, I

got angry. I took the lotaa (beaker) that was lying there, washed it a little, and took water

from their pot. After that, they started offering me water before I could ask for it. They

said that they were “chamar” (low caste) and they did not want to destroy my faith by

offering me their water. They would say, “you are higher than us and we are lower than

you are.”

Identifying the “Muslim” or Making her Invisible

(Did you feel that, in MS, people’s attitude towards you was as a Musalman and

that everyone else was a Hindu?) No, I didn’t feel that there was any Hindus there or that

I was a Musalman. (Do you consider yourself a Musalman?) Yes. (How? Like I say that I am not a Hindu, even though I was born in a Hindu family, because I don’t understand what it means to be a Hindu. Nor do I celebrate a festival, thinking it is a Hindu festival, or celebrate ID, thinking that it is a Muslim festical). Didi, I agree with you. We also

celebrate Dussehra, Holi, Diwali (Hindu festivals) together. But I feel like a Musalman

when I keep rojas (fasting during the month of Ramzaan).

I like keeping rojas or reading the Quran (Holy book of Muslims). I like reading

the namaaz (prayers). It gives me peace and satisfaction. I used to read the Quran

everyday, but now that I will have two children, I don’t think I can keep this up. I used to

read a few pages of the Quran in the morning. I cannot read much of what is written in

the Quran. But there is much about how to live life in a society. When I read the

Surayasin, one sura in the Quran, I feel good. I don’t quite understand it because it is in

Arabic. I can read Arabic, but I cannot understand its meaning. I can read, write, and

understand Urdu but not Arabic.

(Did people show interest in knowing more about your religion?) Nobody showed interest in our religious affiliations. But everyone knows about Holi/Dusshera; Ramazaan is not so widely talked about or celebrated at the level of the community. In MS too, initially, no one knew about rojas or whether I would have special requirements during the Rojas. I had to tell them one day to give me a roti or anything I could use to open my

Roja. Then Satyabhama didi said to me that I should have told them that I have been fasting. She said, “like other women who also fast, we can make arrangements for you too.” Then during Rojas, I would get my special breakfast as well.

A Leading Question and an Honest Sentiment

(What has happened in Gujarat and also in parts of U.P. is that there is an environment of hate now. Muslims have been massacred. You probably feel scared for yourself and your daughter because the most horrible violence has also happened to the women and girls.) I leave my daughter with my mother. I feel, even now, that I am fine, but what if something happens to my daughter? Here, in KL, there is no Hindu or

Muslim. We are all friends. But I do feel sometimes that my house is in between other houses that are Hindu. They are all nice people and are also helpful. But in this new environment, what can you say about anybody? They all know that I am a Musalman and since the riots happened, I have started to be very concerned about my daughter and all manner of questions keep forming in my mind. There have been no incidents here in

Banda, but who knows about tomorrow? Sometimes, I feel like selling my house and going to live among my own people.

(Do you feel angry about what has happened in Gujarat?) If I feel angry, then

whom should I take it out against? You are my sister; everyone in KL is my sister,

whatever may be in your heart or theirs. So with whom or what do I get angry? Maybe

because I was associated with a sanstha (organization), my understanding is different and

I can reason. If I had not been associated with the sanstha, then maybe I would have

shouted abuses against everyone from the rooftop of my house. Actually, I used to do that

when I was not part of MS.

The Necessity of Marriage in a Context: Presenting a Fragmented Self

(When did you get married?) I got married on July 21, 2002. I was a teacher in

Kishori Kunj in Sivarampur when my mother started a conversation about marriage with

Mate Bhai Sahib, a relative of ours. She told him to look for a match for me. He suddenly sent news one day that there was boy here in Banda, so I should come see him. My mother told them to come see me instead in Karwi. She described me to them as thin and short so that they would recognize me when they met me.

They suddenly came to my home one day, without informing my mother or me first. My mama (mother’s brother) Munna came with them. His is not a Muslim name, but he was adopted. His sister brought him up and affectionately called him “munnu.” He is part of the “biradri” (community by caste) that we are from. He was also a vegetable seller then. So when they came, I wasn’t at home. I was in Sivarampur (a township about half-hour drive from Karwi). Amma (mother) was agitated because she did not know how to get in touch with me there. Then baba (father) sent chacha (father’s younger brother) to ask at MS and fetch me from where I was.

When I was called to go home, then I got scared. I didn’t know what that meant.

Was my mother ill? What was happening? I took my bag and put the kirayaa (money for

the bus) in it and went on my way. I met khalaa (aunt) on the way home and she told me

that there were guests waiting at home. I started crying. I thought that I should have

invited the guests according to some procedure or process. When I came home, I saw a whole bunch of people sitting in the room. I couldn’t figure out who the boy was. He also did not know me. Khalaa said to comb my hair, but I decided that I would not. After

giving everyone tea and breakfast, I ran inside. When they started to leave, they put Rs.

151 in my hands; this was their shagun. That is how my marriage was fixed.

Marriage as Protection, Marriage as Prison

(How is your husband’s attitude toward you?) Initially, it was very cold. When I went from here (Karwi) to Banda, nobody showed any friendliness towards me. They called me thin and dark and behaved strangely toward me. I was all alone in my room in my new home. It was 12:00 a.m., and I was still awake when he (my husband) walked in.

I only recognized him from the wedding bracelet on his wrist. (So until then you didn’t know what he looked like?) No. I recognized the henna on his hand and the bracelet.

Then he got me some water and something to eat.

Protesting Pregnancy: A Contradiction

(You are so thin, you have one child and the other is on the way—you never said to your husband, “no, I don’t want children right now” or took precautions yourself?) I said a lot, didi. The first one I didn’t even know about. But my parents did not want me to have an abortion because, for them, the first generation should not be spoiled. If it is, the

following generations are spoiled too. My mother said that, whatever the case, she would bring up the child. So Fiza was brought up by my mother. Now, after the second child, I will get my operation done. I will do this myself. It is not his decision. We haven’t talked about it. I told him, “you may or may not get your operation done, but I have to suffer.”

So I will get it done.

From Origami to News Reporting: Just Working to Earn

(How did you get involved with Mahila Dakiya (women’s newspaper)? Didi (the first coordinator of MS-Banda) attached me to the process. She gave me three days’ time to decide. I knew that I needed to get news and information from different villages—from my village, the sahyogini’s village, the block about Indira aawaas, Nirmal aawaas, kolaawaas, and so on (different housing developments for the low caste poor). So we got information regarding all this, but never used to do much writing then.

(Do you enjoy journalism or do you think it is a lot of work?) There was no responsibility in MD. Whatever information we got, how much we got, we handed it to the one in charge of all this. If we got no information, then we did not give any information. There is more work here (KL). Before, I would go to an office, ask questions, and I come back with the answers. We did not get the signatures of the person who supplied the answers. So there was no proof that we had gone to this person to validate our news. The responsibility of writing the news went to those who could edit and write in a beautiful hand. We just used to get the news and then help here and there with drawing lines and preparing the MD to go to press.

(From your involvement in MS, KL, and MD, what do you think has changed in

you? Is there something in you that is different?) I have learned about rights, that I can

fight for them. I do not live under pressure now. I can fight for anything I believe in.

Before, I used to be told, “don’t go there at night.” Now I go where I want to. I sleep with or without shutting the door. My in-laws did not like my outings and often tried to stop me. I protested and told them that this is my work and I have to go. My courage has increased in terms of money and other things. He (husband) takes money from me and often does so by shouting at me. But I also have money in the bank. Actually, I used to have money in the bank, but I used it all to pay for my wedding. I paid for everything— utensils, jewelry. I did everything as per my haisiyat (capacity). My father did not

contribute anything to my wedding. He said, “you have your mother to help.” My brother

(badi amma’s son) gave 11,000 rupees and the rest I gave for my wedding expenses.

(Did your bravado emerge out of the MS then?) I didn’t have this courage from before MS. I was very “bhuggi” (timid). Now I speak a little. I go to places by myself.

From MS, we were always sent to different places by ourselves, and this was the way that we were trained to do things by ourselves. Before then, I used to cry at the mere thought of doing things by myself. But now I am brave.

(Did you become part of any educational camp?) Yes, I was in the literacy camps to teach, but not to study. I have not studied in MS. Satyabhama didi encouraged me to study further. I then completed my high school education. I wanted to do my BA. But the year that I was supposed to fill in the forms for the BA, I got married and then got pregnant with Fiza. My in-laws also said: “Why would you want to do a BA now? You

will be a misfit here. You will do a job here and then in four days you might just leave us.” They were quite jealous of my education. In my biradari, people have only now started teaching their daughters. Before, they saw no value in studying. My mother was different. I was educated because of her. I will do the same for Fiza. I will not promise that I will get her to do a BA, MA, or MSW. It will be her choice to study wherever she wants to study. Even if I have to do mazdoori (paid labor) day and night, I will help her study as much as she wants.

Education and Teachers’ Agency: An Analysis

Recruitment of learners was as much a part of institutionalizing a school for women as was the recruitment and training of its teachers or the sahelis. Formalizing the relationship (through curriculum development, methods of its transaction, and organizing the time and space for its conduct) was critical to giving MSK meaning as a school for women and girls. In its recruitment process of the sahelis, first at the village level centers and later specifically for MSK, the program serviced an economic need of its potential recruits. All the sahelis, who were interviewed for this project, had experienced abandonment or violence by family members or spouses. The poverty of the familial and married households intensified the women’s search for a paid vocation, which coincided with a programmatic urgency. In an effort to have a physical presence at the village-level and as an education program for women, literacy centers were instituted. But the centers, as open-air congregations, required a routine that would be processed by a teacher through a language and numeracy primer. The teachers that were recruited either belonged to the villages in which they taught or engrafted themselves in different villages

for the sake of the job. The “teacher” then instituted the program at the grassroots level and made a commitment to recruiting other women and girls, at the grassroots level, for instituting MSK at the district level later. So the sahelis contributed to the institutionalization of education in interconnected ways at twin levels: village and district levels. Therefore, their sense of self as a reforming/reformed agent in the local context was relative to the program and inextricably tied to it.

The sahelis elaborated on the process of the institutionalization of MSK as an emotional journey. They knew how to transact simple language primers in the centers, but, in MSK, to develop and transact new information required a different kind of day-to- night commitment. Learning and teaching therefore became concomitant processes in the process of instituting MSK. There was fear associated with both processes, but when and how sahelis became comfortable with information and its transaction in a classroom setting, MSK’s formalization as a school was ensured. The separation between the learners and teachers, between those who received education and those who imparted it, organized the space as well. For the sahelis, their graduation from learners to teachers was an empowering process. Empowerment to them was self-confidence and courage in the work place and personal life.

MSK was also a source of livelihood. However, this did not suffice for transforming their marital or familial relationships, even though the women’s earning potential brought “home” the elusive husband or father. The financial capability had to be combined with reproductive capacities and the willingness to service family needs, if the relationship was to transform in favor of the saheli. In other words, the saheli did not

question the basis of this relationship, but attempted to reform it by agreeing to its conditions. They protested their spouses’ constant barbs about their fertility and their inability to produce sons instead of daughters. However, they found relief in the birth of a son because the fact itself changed the relationship dynamic and made the spouse kinder and considerate.

What does this say about the nature of women’s agency as re-directed through an institution such as MSK, where a critical space for reflection had been fostered? It shows that the critical space for reflection and change could not be transferred to the real world and to real life relationships. There is a dominant notion of education as a means to an end that women deploy, especially in the context of MSK, and therefore MSK’s potential in questioning the framework is neutralized. MSK becomes a school like any other school, but for women. Its curriculum is written and transacted differently, yet the content approximates the curriculum of the regular schools. Women find freedom in collectivity and unburden their minds about problems and people that plague them.

Yet a critical discourse on social norms and expectations within a permitting institutional space can never result in shifting configurations of power in other institutional relationships such as marriage. If marriage is the only marker of a woman in a social context, and thus her identity is inextricably tied to this institution alone, then no critical discourse can empower a woman to willfully dispense with the institution. She may be widowed, abandoned, or replaced. Yet, to the women, these circumstances serve as examples of misfortune, rather than as reasons to question oppression.

MSK, therefore, limits the possibilities of women’s agency because it fosters a

fragmented self. It imagines an easy co-relation between social debate and social change.

It believes in the force of women’s argument against patriarchy as representative of their

resolve and ability to dismantle its effects in their life. However, it fails to see how

women selectively deploy critique at different times to justify their roles or identities as

learners or teachers. They may continue to live a socially acceptable life in a marriage

and with children, but also use the mandate of the program to question such a life, but as

intellectual practice. In fact, one of the sahelis deployed an even more interesting

strategy—she projected social change in the future and through the lives of her daughters.

This means that, for now, a critique of marriage, caste, and religion must be made, even

as a life is lived as usual within these institutions. The critiques are not sustained,

fostered, or strategized towards political transformation of a social topography.

Challenges to institutions have to be more than discursive critique fostered in a simulated space of an experimental school. The discursive critique itself also has to be more than rote learning of what patriarchy is and where it is located. It has to be an understanding of the self as a constituted subject of such a patriarchy and from which must emerge strategies (collective and individual) to change its particular effects in the everyday life of each participant. But if the program’s institutional identity depended on its linkages with other government and village level institutions and on eliciting their goodwill and support for a fledgling program, then MSK could neither construct an alternate identity for itself nor produce a collective agency that would question such institutional solidarity.

The program did mobilize women to protest the apathy of institutions such as the

water board, but that was earlier in its career, when its identity as a woman’s program depended on how many women it could recruit and mobilize within its fold, rather than institutional solidarity with the water board. The equation changed thereafter. Instead of understanding the effects of such collectivization on women’s agency and on the institutions that are the objects of its critique, the program used the moment to transform this agency into an institutional collaboration (technical training in handpump repair).

The program therefore manufactured women’s consent and collectivity through identifying water as an issue. However, it used both the issue and the collective to institutionalize training and literacy. Thereafter, women’s agency got redirected and

reformed in institutions such as MSK, where technical training “generated” demand of

information and therein existed the rationale for MSK.

Institutionalization of education then circumscribed women’s agency even as it

fostered it in prescribed ways. It is not surprising that, in their passage through the program/school, the women tried to stabilize the discourses of change and re-belong to

the structures of their oppression, but in their perceived newly empowered status. The

program itself, as well as its basis in the larger developmental framework of the 1990s,

was not without critique, even if that critique was formulated at the moment the program

was closed in 2001 in the Chitrakoot district of U.P. The program’s closure here brought

into sharper focus the contradictions of the program; it encouraged women to own the

program, but when women wanted to claim ownership of its future, it denied their claim.

Instead, a program that allegedly only enjoyed a government mandate, rather than suffer its complete control, became government property in 2001.

For the sahelis, this moment became appropriate to question not only the mandate of the program and its premise in democratic principles of debate and discussion, but also the identities that were formulated in and through their passage. What does one say of a program that invited the sahelis to organize the MSK experience in 1995, but, which by

1999, marginalized their creative input into the institution and, in 2001, closed the schools down altogether? Consequently, the programmatic identity in the region also was decimated. Therefore, the sahelis ask a legitimate question: If a program had to leave in the way it did, why did it have to enter our realm with promises of making our lives

better? Conversely, if the program exited in the way it did, then it never meant to do what

it promised. If there could be no alternate space or community to which the women or

sahelis could belong, then the sense of belongingness would need to be transferred

elsewhere. This “elsewhere” was nowhere but in the existing social relationships—

marriage and paternal family.

Even if the program gave them a critical perspective on such relationships, its

own treatment of their lives, as objects of experimentation, returned the sahelis to the

former. Even though the women felt that their return was triumphant because of the new

found love and respect they achieved in these relationships, the return was still

problematic. It only put women in a position for a reconfigured exploitation, especially

with regard to finances. To be accepted, the women indulged the family in expensive

social practices and customs. Brothers were married in a lavish ceremony, father’s and

husband’s gambling debts were paid, and chronic illnesses were treated, and husband’s

business enterprises were funded, as were children’s or younger siblings’ education. One

saheli had even funded her own marriage, with some help from a distant cousin rather than the immediate family. In the words of one saheli: “I am not saying that we are not

empowered. But we have to see everything . . . yes, we can critique society because we

think we know where the problems are. But even after that, we cannot do a lot of things

that we think we can after critiques . . . I cannot fight the whole society. I have certain

responsibilities towards my family and I will abide by them.” This is both a critique of

critique as a strategy to institute social change without determining the nature of the

connection between social change and critique and the trajectory of the program that did

not explore the political possibilities of critique in the social realm.

In the words of another saheli: “(in MS) . . . I did not feel that there was any

Hindu or that I was a Musalmaan . . . (but) no one showed interest in my religious

affiliations. But everyone knows about Holi/Dusshera; Ramazaan is not so widely talked

about or celebrated at the level of the community. In MS too, initially, no one knew about

rojas or whether I would have special requirements during the Rojas. I had to tell them

one day to give me a roti or anything I could use to open my Roja. Then Satyabhama didi

said to me that I should have told them that I have been fasting. She said, ‘like other

women who also fast, we can make arrangements for you too.’ Then during Rojas, I

would get my special breakfast as well.” This is a critique of the assumed Hindu

ideological basis of the program that served to reform a subaltern gender category, while

excluding another that was religiously differentiated.

During her inclusion within the program, a Muslim saheli resisted articulating its

politics of exclusion. Yet, she brought up moments within the program in which these politics were suffered by her. Such a politics of exclusion within a government program that claimed democratic participation, and in the context of volatile Hindu nationalism, only served to reify religious hierarchies. Gujarat, where a Hindu nationalist government orchestrated genocide against the Muslim minorities in 2002, demonstrated that the politics of exclusion within MS is not without serious ramifications. It is a statement on both the Hindu upper caste/class configuration of the state and of the institutions that

align with it. Development that is mediated through such configurations then reifies such hierarchies at the local level.

The religious basis of the politics of exclusion in planning is even more dangerous when one takes into account the Gujarat politics. The Hindu fundamentalist agenda there attempted to create intercaste solidarity by identifying the Muslim as the other and as the common enemy. The state therefore managed to violently split the subaltern identity along religious lines in Gujarat. It also problematized dalit politics as necessarily independent of and against the state. Therefore, when a program is institutionalized, without problematizing its unmarked religious bias, and is engrafted, even if temporarily, through a local NGO with an alleged Hindu fundamentalist sensibilities, it reifies social and religious hierarchies. It also therefore subverts the process of feminist collectivization

that is woman-centered, rather than fractured along religious and caste/class lines.

When asked why no Muslim women were recruited into the program beyond M

(the saheli) in the Banda district, consultants and coordinators alike had no specific

answer. The “problem” is relegated to the realm of demographics—“probably there are

no Muslim communities where the program was operational” (Ramchandran). Without

social mapping and a census analysis, the statement itself is irresponsible and dangerous.

Therefore, a program that claimed to reform subaltern identities remained elitist and exclusionary. If its own basis remained unquestioned, then there existed no legitimate basis to assume that it would empower women to question the basis of their oppression.

So even as women had “samajh” (understanding) about caste and its particular operation in their own lives, “aatmasaath” was lacking. Samajh was not internalized to side with oneself, to both critique social institutions and to resist their negative operation in women’s lives. The institutionalization that sprang from an unquestioned elitist basis of the program served to undermine the articulated and radical mandate of the program— to empower women by questioning and resisting cultural practices against them, with them. For the sahelis, empowerment, as relative to the program, was primarily economic.

MS gave them a job security and money towards servicing the needs of their families.

Therefore, aatmsaath did not result from such a job. Aatmsaath, if realized, would have facilitated (by the program’s own admission) a gender-based identification among women across their institutional roles in the program. There was a greater possibility that a collective could have then questioned the program, including its elitist bias as well as its undemocratic exit from Banda in 2001. A collective could have then bargained from a more informed and fearless perspective to take independent responsibility of MSK beyond 2001. Sahelis, however, were neither able to form a collective nor able to claim

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ownership to MSK, which they had singularly helped structure and establish in Banda in

1995.

In summary then, empowerment for the sahelis was a complicated experience. It

has meant, on the one hand, economic capability (money in the bank, money to fund

one’s own marriage or that of siblings, or money to buy property or build a one-room

house in the city) and, on the other hand, a re-subordination of women to the same social

practices and institutions from which their poverty and oppression stemmed. So instead

of rejecting marriage, women service it. Instead of rejecting the violence of the

institution, women enlist the help of didis and friends to make the husband understand

and reform his ways. The husband and the institution are never abandoned.

Even with their developed critical insights into social practices, the sahelis failed to see bad marriages as a common condition. Instead of developing a common strategy to deal with a common condition, the sahelis prefer to deal with theirs as individual dilemmas. So at one level, the sahelis share a greater understanding of issues and problems, but are unable to relieve themselves of such problems in real life. Critiques of social institutions did not translate into fighting to reform them. Instead, they found themselves rationalizing social norms individually and left the need to build coalitions, against a shared condition, unarticulated. Again, economic empowerment subordinated them socially. In other words, their ability to earn did not result in their social empowerment as women. As some things within the marital dynamics changed, others remained unchanged. Even as husbands cooked, cleaned, and looked after the children, they did not bring in regular income. They continued to depend on the wife to run the

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household and asserted their maleness through random acts of violence, physical and mental.

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CHAPTER 4

INSTITUTIONALIZING EDUCATION/FORMING VILLAGE LEVEL

COLLECTIVES: THE SAHYOGINIS’ EXPERIENCES

Introduction

As I sat in the local NGO office once again, I explained to U, a sahyogini, the purpose of my interviews. I explained that I was interested in learning what happens in a program, from top to the bottom, and also seeing what empowerment has meant for the workers, such as the sahyoginis, within the program. I wanted to understand how the program transformed them or how they changed the program itself. (Looks like now everyone is sad and distressed by the way the program was shelved in Chitrakoot after 10 years or so). U interjected.

Didi, the distress is not about the program leaving—there are five-year plans that come and go, but what mark they leave is important. The important thing is how, within that phase-out process, the program makes certain that its activities will continue in a good manner. The MS program suddenly closed in the region where work was done for a period of 10 to 15 years, where, with much difficulty, sahelis came out, sanghas

(collectives) were formed, and women began their battles, whether these battles were for education, wages, ration-cards, or anything else. Now there is suddenly no MS. There was no discussion before it closed in Chitrakoot, how the sanghas will be formed into mahasanghas (federations), how that transformation will happen through the active participation of the women involved with it. The program should have left only when the women were trained to make this transformation effective.

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Death of a Program and the Death of Goodwill

According to U, there was a lot of talk about the program shutting down, but we

had no inkling that it would go the way it did. For example, if you cut sugarcane at the

wrong time or at the wrong end, then it will be difficult to extract any juice out of it. But

if you cared enough to cut it at the right time and right manner, then its juice will be the

sweetest. So it was not as if the women were not empowered by the program. There were

some very empowered sakhis, who worked harder than the sahyoginis for their rights in

the villages they were in. But the program did not consider their future. It was very

distressing to see a match being lit under the program, without anyone knowing, and then everyone ran away while the ashes lay there.

Becoming a Sahyogini

(When did you first hear about the MS program?) I heard about it in 1992. The

office was very near my house in Shankar Bazaar, near the grain mill there. My house

was just behind the office. Often, I would see a group of women and wonder why they

were there. Then someone told me that a new program for women had come to

Chitrakoot. During this time, I used to visit my parents in Karwi quite often. My sasuraal

was in Banda and there was a great deal of tension between them and me. During one

rakshaa-bandhan (a Hindu festival where a sister ties a thread on her brother’s wrist

asking for his protection), I decided not to go back to my sasuraal. At the time, I was

pregnant with my daughter. I went to MS to ask for work, but I was told to return in three

months, when my daughter was a little older, so I could travel.

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My first field trip was to the Manikpur and Tindwari blocks (like a county in the

US). This was a way for me, as well as for the program, to find out if I could do this kind

of work. Our appointments were based on the evaluations from our field trip. We were

evaluated on how we sit with the women and talk with them, and the old sahyoginis used

to take care of this evaluation. I started as a sahyogini in the Chitrakoot block. I did social

mapping for the village. I would map the number of bastis, the caste distribution in each

village, what kinds of problems they encountered, and so forth. This was then shared in

the sahyogini meetings that took place every month. The plan for the next month also was

discussed at the meetings.

In the beginning, we were responsible for five villages. After six months, we were

evaluated on our work in these five villages and if our work was satisfactory, then we

were given five more villages to take care of. We were also sent to Rishikesh for gender

training. Jagori, a Delhi-based NGO, conducted the training.

(Did you like the training?) At the time we really liked it. All the people who were there had gone through some problem or another. So the training became a place where we could talk openly about things we used to speak about in secret. The training was a good opportunity for us to understand ourselves. But training became useful and meaningful only when we went out in the field and implemented parts of it. From the training, our understanding began to develop about women as a group, what their condition is, why it is that women work so much, but there is so little that gets recognized. How we used our training showed up in our work. This became known through the evaluations of our work conducted by the older sahyoginis.

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The sahyoginis went to my villages to see what kind of an identity I had established with the women there and how I behaved with them and the other people in the village. They did not directly ask the people about me. Instead, they asked questions such as what kind of work have the people done in the village, what are some of the

problems you have taken up with the local authorities? This kind of questioning was

more like asking the people about their lives than finding out about me. But in this

conversation, I was always mentioned. People would refer to me in relation to issues. If I

had been going to the villages and the women never came out to see me, then how long

could this remain hidden in a conversation? At some point of time it would have become

evident, if it was true, that I have not engaged with the people and that the people really

had not taken to me or that my relationship with them was not right. So when evaluators

landed in the village, I called out to the women and they all came out immediately. This

was followed by some singing, dancing, and humor here and there. This way, it became

evident that I was liked in the villages and that the people responded to me. So I

continued in my job.

After a year, I became a trainer and did many sakhi (leader of the sangha) training

sessions. My job was not to make a sangha. The women had to do that. First, we had to

talk to the women, to get them to open up about their problems and how they felt they

could contribute to dealing with them. Sakhis were only appointed when we had meetings

in the village. Here, we would discuss the need for a group and a leader who would lead

it. The leader, we said, was important to know and identify because if there was a need to

go to the block with your problems, then the leader could go there and talk about it. The

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whole village can never go as a group because it is too big and the problem may not require the force of such a large group. With women, it was an even bigger thing. Women generally do not travel from their villages to the block or the town or back. The men do that.

So the problem was not only developing the sangha, but also getting women to identify someone who was brave enough to speak on behalf of the group and go to the block for their sake. The leader also had to be someone to whom people listened. She should be sensible and maybe older. Generally, older women have more say and are listened to more than are the younger women. But even if the woman was not older, but was a good speaker and could convince people of her point of view, then she could also be the leader of the sangha. She should have some relationship with the people in the village and also their respect.

One could always find those women who shared in everyone’s happiness and sorrows at different times. And when you laid out this criterion to the people, a name would always come up. Somehow, the pressure would build up on that person to accept the role of the leader of the group. Sometimes reluctantly, but sometimes even eagerly, the woman would accept. Once the woman was elected, she was required to go for training, where she would learn how to take village level issues to block level meetings and present them before the block superintendent.

In the same training, we discussed women’s bodies, their physiology and social meanings. From such discussions, we would move into issues such as violence against women and ask the sakhis how they could then intervene in situations, rather than just

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ignore them as a wife-husband issue. The sakhi would then hold similar discussions with the women in the village. We also did a play to develop our point further. In the play, we showed a drunkard, who was also a wife beater. One day, when he was beating his wife, the neighbor decided to intervene. He tries]d to save the wife by pulling her away from her husband. But the wife accused the neighbor instead of manhandling her. She felt that her “izzat” (self-respect) was tarnished by the neighbor and that this made the husband more suspicious of her. But we tried to explain that it is the husband who is wrong because he drinks and beats his wife. Through the play, we were trying to develop this

“samajh” (understanding) that untouchability is not just caste-based but also gender- based. It was important for women then to build their own sangha to erase its practice against them.

Building Village Level Collectives (Sanghas)

(So were there sanghas in the villages that were very strong and some that kept breaking apart?) The sanghas in Manikpur were very strong because they set themselves apart. There, the sakhis were strong leaders who brought the village together and inspired the collective to fight for fair wages for women. They were able to inspire all of

Manikpur to lay siege to the government office there and demand that the rural schemes for low castes, such as the housing scheme, be implemented as quickly as possible. They also fought to get the handpumps installed in villages where there was great shortage of water. They fought against the misappropriation of money by people such as the pradhan or the headman of the village, which should rightfully have gone to build schools for children. The sangha women have fought against the kotedaar (the supplier of

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agricultural goods), who priced the goods very high or sometimes refused to sell grains to

farmers from low castes. The sanghas have proved that they may be Kol women, the

lowest in the caste hierarchy, but they too have rights and that they can fight for them

collectively. So there have been no sanghas/samoohs that have not been able to do what

was stipulated for them.

If we evaluate according to strong, weak, and middle, then there is your hierarchy

for evaluating the sanghas. But hierarchies are destructive. We did not want sanghas to be competing with each other. But my point is that there was no sangha that wasn’t good or capable. Each sangha was comprised of Kol women, who knew about hardships. Every woman was beaten by her husband, every woman was paid unfair wages for agricultural labor, every woman was almost a bonded laborer, every woman and her family was in debt, everyone faced a severe water crisis, every woman was exploited by the kotedaar.

All this was enough for the group to come together and take these issues on, slowly but definitely. Everyone’s problems were therefore interconnected and it made sense to have a group because, on a personal level, it was a futile fight. Any personal benefit is meaningful only if the fight for it is shared.

So MS, I think, was the only program that brought women out of their house and the village, whether as a sakhi, a teacher, or a sahyogini. By coming out of the house, I mean that women had a better sense of their own power to change things for them outside of their domestic world. (So what you are saying is that empowerment for women lay in moving out of the house for work, even if they were still being beaten by their husbands at home?) I think that there are many definitions of empowerment. Let’s say that a

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woman is being beaten everyday but is not protesting or talking about this to anyone, we

will not say that she is empowered. She is helpless. But if the same woman understands

that it is wrong to be beaten and then turns around to her husband with the question, “why

are you beating me?” she is in the process of being empowered. Sometimes in the

meetings, women became brave enough to say that they disliked their husbands sleeping

with them without their permission. Then we were not sure what to say or do, but knew that the meeting was a good place for the women to really be honest with themselves.

Engendering Discourse

(So you set an agenda for the meetings in the village? But sometimes did you have to set aside your agenda and concentrate on an urgent issue?) No, I never made an agenda. I would think of what might be things to discuss there. There always was a purpose to my visit. If the aim of the program was to solve real life problems, then that is what we tried to aim for. We wanted to make the group so strong that it became possible for them to solve their own problems. I never went to the village as a guest, to ask a question or two, and then leave. I went there to build relationships with women. I did ask

questions but those related to their real life problems, such as: “Do you have land? Is the land in your name? Do you have control over it? Where do you get your water from?”

In the village of Chipni, for example, every dalit had pattas (land deeds) in their name, but did not actually own the land. The deeds were somewhere but they did not know where. Slowly we formed relationships with people so that we could deal with the issue. The people then took their case to the “lekhpal” (the deed writer) and brought him with them. The lekhpal then measured their lands and wrote the deeds for them. It

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happened for the first time in Banda that a lekhpal came to the village and measured the land. We only gave him lunch as we would any guest in the village. The biggest achievement was getting our work done without paying him a bribe. This spread to other villages and a whole movement began.

Education is Literacy or Vice Versa

(When did education start in the villages?) At different meetings, the issue of literacy and education would come up. The women would say that we are not literate, we cannot even read what is written on the pattas. At these moments, I talked about the program’s main emphasis: education for women. I suggested that, if they wanted this, I could arrange for some training and a center for literacy. Gradually, the women became agreeable to participating in the education experience. We wanted the women to get out of their village environment and to come to Karwi for a literacy camp. This way, the women could be away from their every day chores and children and family and concentrate on their studies.

The response was very good for the first literacy camps. It increased the women’s taste for education, for more information. This led to the Kishori kunj and the MSK schools. Kishori kunj was in Tindwari and MSK was here in Karwi. First there was MSK, where both girls and women were together. There were problems relating to the age differences and the communication gap. There was a lot of unhealthy competition between the two groups. So later it was decided that the women be separated from the girls. The girls were then sent to the Kishori kunj later.

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(In the village there were centers that were run by the “shikshikaas.” But how

were they appointed?) The sahyoginis used to appoint them. The teachers all had some

formal training. But their continuity in the job was largely based on their performance in

the center over a certain period of time, how much responsibility they could take, and

what kind of excitement they could generate about literacy. So the demand for the center came from the village and we responded to that. Later, these shikshikaas also were called sahelis in MSK. They taught from primers, but did not ignore the real issues that always emerged from one or another aspect of education. Whether the issue was violence or wages or anything that the women wanted to address, it was the responsibility of the saheli to engage in a discussion of it. She couldn’t say, “no, we need to read through this now and discuss what you want later.”

It was also up to her to decide whether the issue was really an issue or a way not to read or a sign of boredom or mischief. Even though women and the girls came with sufficient enthusiasm, there were times that we had to create the enthusiasm for the day.

Instead of just reading, we would have a puppet show such as the one called “kaluaa”

(woman with a blackened thumb). It is about this woman who cannot read or write or even sign her name. So she has to take her letter to be read by somebody in the village.

This means that if she had been able to study, she would not be dependent on others to have her letter read. The other thing in the play is about medicine. If she cannot read the label, how can she give the right medicine to her child, and if the child becomes more ill because of the wrong medicine, then she can only blame herself. We made a “phad” (a

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banner) as well as sang songs to make a point about the importance of education. From these centers, we were able to get girls and women for MSK.

(So how were the literacy camps different?) In the centers, there were many distractions. The women came to study at the center and after even ten minutes, a voice would say “amma, come bhaiyaa (brother) is crying” or “go give chara (fodder) to the animals.” With so much to do all the time, the women could never really sit and study. In

camps, therefore, we felt that the women would be able to concentrate better.

(What about the men? Did they feel happy or irritated that the women were there to study?) Both, I think. They were irritated with the fact that the older women were being asked to come and study also. They felt that studying was not their job. Instead doing “chulhaa-bartan” (cooking-cleaning) was their job. But when the men saw the miracle of education, when problems started getting solved in the village, the men began to believe in the power of education. Their irritation turned to appreciation. The men initially would not allow the women to come and study even at the center, and forget about the camps! So we had to talk to the men as well—in groups or as individuals

(especially those who were adamant about keeping the women away from the centers).

We wanted them to feel that, without their goodwill, we wouldn’t want the women to come to the center and that it is important for everyone that the women come. All this was new to us and everyone in the village—the education, the sangha, the dalits demanding their rights, the concept of rights itself. So we had to struggle to set up the appropriate environment for women’s education to flourish.

Experiencing Empowerment and Defining Empowerment

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(So are there women who have raised their voices against injustices against them

and in places where they haven’t raised their voices? Are there still women in MS who

have lived and worked in the program, but still want a son?) Yes, but I am not talking

about the thinking. There are many women, sahyoginis and sahelis, who still get beaten

up by their husbands and secretly do pray for a son. My definition of empowerment is

that it is a step-by-step process, but where one step may be forward and one backward.

One step forward is becoming the sahyogini, but one step backward is giving into

familial pressure to have a son. They also live with some illusions. They think that a son

will take care of them in their old age.

(You think that the MS program lost out here then or failed to empower women to

leave their husbands if they continued to beat them?) But there are people in the program

who have done that, who made the decision to leave. But those who stayed, maybe for them, the “aatmsaath” (self-identification) has not happened. It is not that they have no

“samajh” (understanding) of social practices and the harm they do to women’s bodies.

But they are not able to deal with these social prescriptions and hence are not

empowered. They do not make the effort to realize that girls can be educated too. In fact,

girls can be more supportive of families than boys. They do not see how they as women

continue to carry the burden of bringing up their families. So why do they still feel so

insecure? I don’t understand.

I am trying here to differentiate between “aatm saath” and “samajh.” A woman

may have the “samajh” of what gender is, but how much she has used the same thing

towards “aatmsaath” is still not visible in many MS graduates. (So empowerment is only

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that which is personal? Can a program bring this about or is all this dependent on an

individual’s personality, will?) Empowerment depends a lot on the individual, but a

program can also provide the push that is needed to make women do what they must to

change their lives. But I think the process of empowerment and the shape it takes depend

a lot on the coordinator of the program or the one who runs it. A lot of programs come

and go. They do what is needed, which is recorded and becomes the history of the

program in the area. The history is always about how much was done in the program, but

never about what was not done. All this depends on the coordinator and how he or she sees the future of the program and then takes it along accordingly.

When I joined the program I was 17 years old. I had one daughter. But I told myself that I would not marry again. I will have male friends, but will never marry anyone. I think I am courageous and I am very stubborn too. But such courage, I have to say, I got from the program. It added to and brought out that part of me. There were 20 sahyoginis in the program, and each one of us took different things from the program.

The program definitely changed my life and way of thinking.

Empowerment Routinized or Routinized Work

(What was your daily routine?) If I needed to get to a village that was far from

Karwi, then I would have to plan differently in each season. In summer, I would get up at

5:00 a.m., make some chana (gram) and paranthas (fried wheat bread) for myself, and

then leave. Sometimes I would carry some flour and make rotis or parathas in the village.

Most of the time, I didn’t eat their food. I didn’t want them to feel the pressure and responsibility of feeding me every time that I was there. But when they insisted, then I

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would take some vegetable and roti from them. This was the way I was able to ensure

that I wasn’t seen as discriminatory. I wanted to maintain a balance. It took me one hour

to get to these villages. By leaving early in the morning, I made sure that I escaped the

mid-day sun either way. I also carried a towel to cover my head from the harsh sun.

In the winter, I got out of the house between 9:00 and 10:00 a.m. But sometimes I

needed to get out a little early because I knew that sowing happens in the winter. I wanted

to make sure that I got to the village before the people went to the fields to work. There

was no fixed time for coming back. It all depended on how long I would be able to meet

with the women before they set out to do their chores. Sometimes, I would even stay the

night because people would come back at 8:00 at night after a long day in the fields. This

way, I could chat with them leisurely; as they made food or as they breast-fed their

younger children. During the tendu patta season, the women used to be away for longer

periods of time. They went to heavily forested regions, where tendu grew wild. I used to make sure that I knew when the women would be there and when they would be back.

Once I reached the village, I would sit at someone’s house and the women would come and gather there.

Working through Fear: An Instance of Individual and Collective Empowerment (Issue 1)

In the beginning I did not go alone. Somebody always accompanied me. But later when I got to know people and the people got to know me, we developed a great rapport.

The people in the village consider you their daughter, their sister. They know that we

have come there for a good purpose, so they consider it their responsibility to take care of

you while you are their guest. I used to go to Panhaii (a village) regarding MS and people

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used to come to drop me off at the station. The Panhaii was infamous for dacoits. (Did the men ever say to you, “Why are you doing this kind of work?”) The men from the upper caste looked at me suspiciously. They would accuse me of attempting to incite the chamars against them. They complained about how the chamars suddenly had power and demanded more wages for the same work. Before the chamars were satisfied with 1 kg of wheat per every 15 kgs they harvested, but now they wanted nothing less than 5 kgs for the same amount of work. So the upper caste farmers felt that their power was now very shaky.

In Bhitakhera village, there are more “kurmis” (landed, upper caste). They are considered wealthy and powerful. The season was “chait” or when the crop yield is cut.

The sangha in the village was just beginning its work. The landowners wanted the women to come and cut the yield. The women said that they would come only if they were promised 5 kgs of the yield for the work they did. The landowners said: “What is this new thing that you have learned? Till now you never put forth any such question regarding wages. I would call for you and you would come and cut the yield. You would then take your wages and be on your way.” The women said: “That was then. We have knowledge now. We know that the government wage is Rs. 57, and if we take 5 kgs of wheat from you, then it will amount to the wages that is due to us. Where is the problem then?”

The problem was that if the women didn’t cut the yield, then either the animals would eat it or it would rot. So the farmers had no choice but to accept the women’s demands. The women were halfway through cutting the field, when they stopped and

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demanded that the landlord pay them half their due. The women wanted to test the

landowners. When they refused to pay half, the women got angry and left the fields half

uncut. They refused to compromise. This was empowering because the landowners then tried to get workers from the other villages, but no one came; they showed support for the women who had demanded their fair share. So eventually he had to give in, pay the women half of their asking prices, and request that they finish cutting the yield. When incidents like these happened, then the dalits saw that empowerment was a possibility, whereas the landed castes saw their power being undercut. The landed caste did try to oppress the women again. They tried to intimidate me. I used to go to the village on my cycle. They would stop me and threaten me. I was scared, but I knew that these were empty threats. I had the backing of the program, and the village people were always very supportive and they always made me feel safe.

Building the Context for Handpump Training to Materialize (Issue 2)

(So what was the effect of women becoming handpump mechanics in their village? A lot has been written about this in the local and national newspapers). The handpump issue came from Manikpur. In the Manikpur area, there was a serious drinking water problem. Every meeting there was about water. People said that if no one comes to repair the handpump, we didn’t know how we would eat, drink, or survive. After that, we had meetings in every village on how to solve the problem. We asked for women to be there at these meetings because we wanted to present our idea about training women to be mechanics. We knew that many men would have come and gladly participated in the discussion, even volunteered to be part of the training. But we wanted to focus on the

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connection between women and water—that if it was primarily their problem, then they

should be part of the solution as well. Also, we were working with a woman’s

perspective and it was critical for us to bring women forward into the equation.

The intellectual section of our society has control over education and technical

information and we wanted to bring that directly into the hands of the Dalit section,

especially illiterate village women. When the women agreed to participate in the training,

it was a matter of great hilarity in the villages. The Kol women were felt to only know

how to use the sickle and the cutter and make cow-dung cakes and food on the chulhaa.

Then there was also an environment of casteism and untouchability. The Kols were not

allowed near the handpumps or wells of the upper castes in the village. When after their

first training, the women went to fix their first handpumps in the villages, they were

asked to turn back. The headman said: “They are Kol. What can they do with their tools

here, when they have no intelligence? They will only destroy the handpump.” This was

said despite the fact that the handpump was already broken! There was so much animal

waste around the handpump that it smelled horrible.

So the only reason the men protested was because they did not want Kol women

to be the ones to fix their handpump. They couldn’t accept Kol women doing anything of such importance. So the women had to battle for their identity. When the women proved

that they indeed could fix the handpumps, they were invited back to the village. But still,

there was sarcasm against this new breed of mechanics. Aspersions were cast on their character. People said that the women go to the villages to fix handpumps mainly to eat a

breakfast of jalebis and samosas. This meant that these women were of “loose” character,

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without shame or dignity. Even their husbands were called useless for not keeping their

women in control. A lesser person would have been stricken with guilt and would have

become tense. But our group was better than that.

We had meetings in the villages and with the village headmen. We wanted to talk openly about their misconceptions and misgivings. Perceptions began to change slowly but surely. The same women became stars, the talk of every village. Everyone wanted them to come to their village first. Initially, the women took no money for their services but later they did. The headman would pay for their wages from the JRY (Jawahar

Rozgar Yojna or the Jawahar Employment Scheme) fund. The money that used to come from UNICEF for the water project was then contributed to the JRY and from here the women were paid. Sometimes the community used to collect money to pay the women for their work. If pipes needed to be bored into the ground, then the wage was Rs. 250.

(The newspaper articles celebrated the fact that the women mechanics were trained despite their illiterate status. How did the women learn all the technical words in the training?) I was there in the meetings. At that time, an engineer was there. He was very supportive of the training. We knew that men would do the training and we were also sensitive to the fact that the idea of men and women working in the same space had potential for tensions. When the women saw that the trainers were men, they all wanted to run away. The first day was bad. The terms that were introduced were all in English, such as rod, cylinder, chickball, washer, bearing, and so forth, and when the women could not make out the words at all, they felt like running away. They said: “We are very scared of all this. How can we ever learn all this?”

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I then talked to the women. I said if you run away now, what will you tell the

people in the village? You will prove to them what they already have said about you, that

you are only good for chulhaa-chowkaa. So we tried a different strategy. I said that I am

tall and thin, quite like a rod, so the women decided to call me rod instead of my name.

One didi was fat and so she got called a cylinder. So every time they saw me or didi they said: “Hey rod, where are you going?” or “Cylinder, how are you?” This way, the human

shapes were now equated with the shapes of the tools. But the training was a lot of work.

Ten days were spent in the classroom and then ten days were spent making the

handpumps in the field.

(Have people left this job since?) Yes, some people have. They all have their

problems; the child is young and therefore it is difficult to travel to different places. Once

they stopped doing repair jobs, their training too got left behind. Kalia was a great

mechanic, but now is a watchwoman at the local NGO. She sometimes goes to the field

to do some repair work just to be able to earn some money. But the idea to train women

was a great idea, I think.

A: The Sahyogini and House Contractor

Building Houses, Building a New Self (Issue 3)

(How did you start as a contractor making houses?) Jal Nigam (the water board)

used to give out contracts for making the platforms for the handpumps. Didi convinced

them to give the NGO the contract to make platforms. This way, we could also undergo

training in masonry. Later, we had another idea. We thought that if the women were good at making platforms, then they could also be trained in building houses. We knew that

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building houses was very different from building platforms. It did not require to-scale

measurement. I also knew that women often made their own huts, making the roof with

threshed wheat stalks or even using fresh cow or buffalo dung in water to lay out a floor

and plaster the wall. So we had to provide some encouragement to the women to

participate in this training. We gave them wages and travel allowance. At that time, we

got a contract to make 58 colonies or houses in the villages of Thikapurwa and Bari.

Many individuals and organizations got contracts then and we were one of them. We made all the houses within a year. This was an achievement.

(So what all did the women do?) Women used to do “dhulaii,” or filling in the foundation to the house with sand/ cement. The foundation to the house was marked and then we got a male worker to dig along the marked lines to about 4- to 5-feet deep. The women would then fill in these trench-like dugouts. There was always a male mason who would help out here and there. He would help with the measurements, labeling, and other tasks. The women initially did not do any measurements of the property for the purpose of construction. They only did the “dhulaii.”

I gave the women training in doing layouts for the houses. There are three main steps to building a house. First, the foundation is marked and dug out. Second, the dugouts are filled in. And third, the “wall” comes up along the “kurtii.” If the foundation is 2 feet, then 1/2-foot of kurtii or a cut out is made alongside the foundation. Here, one feet of wall is raised. The women never complained that all this was too much work. But sometimes they felt that they couldn’t do one or the other thing. Women would cart heavy stones to where the roof was being laid. This was very difficult because the stones

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are heavier than bricks and the women were often carrying 6 to 10 heavy stones on their

heads in the middle of a hot day. So I can understand their plight. But that was work.

Education and Human Sensibility: The Case for MS

(So all this you have done, what does it mean to you? Is this empowerment to

you?) Well, in the whole of Manikpur, I was known as the contractor. Everyone used to

be looking for me. Some wanted me to take building sand from them, someone wanted

me to take limestone from them. If I wasn’t in my office and people came by to see me,

they would leave a message for me that I should meet with them urgently. I used to feel great about this (laughs with obvious pleasure!). So I would meet with all kinds of people

at any time. I wasn’t afraid. I used to think, “What can these people do to me?” I kept

good “hisaab” (accounts) of all the “thekaa” (deliveries) I took. If, for example, the total

“dhokaa” (truckload) was less than what it should be, I would make sure that the price I

paid matched the amounts I received.

(Was all this courage the outcome of MS and the training that you got there or

were you like this from the start?) No, I never had such courage before. This is only

because of MS. (Did you do anything else in MS besides being the contractor? Were you

involved with education at all?) No, I wasn’t. I have not really understood the education

component of MS very much. I was never really connected to MSK. I was briefly involved with Mahila Dakiya, with its layout and writing. I don’t think that education was

only what happened in either the centers or the MSK. There is no end to education

because there is no end to learning. If we are teaching in MSK, then there is a boundary,

a limit to that. Beyond the MSK, there was the class five. I know that the girls who

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graduated from MSK wanted to sit for the class five exams in regular schools, and the

people in MS helped them with it. After that step, it was up to the girls to decide what they wanted to do. But just taking class five exams did not mean that they were now completely educated.

(What do you think is more empowering? Education through field experience or

MSK style training? If you had the opportunity, would you have gone to MSK?) Yes, I would have. The girls in MSK did find the right kind of environment in which to study. It was difficult to get the girls to come to MSK. The fact that so many came was empowerment for us and them. Almost every day, there was an issue to be dealt with at school. If there was a skirmish, a fight, then that would be resolved first. If there was case of domestic violence somewhere in the village, then the MSK girls would go there as well. If there was a problem with one girl’s family, then the other MSK girls would get involved with it. This was empowerment. Their sensibility, mentality was changing. They felt strong in themselves.

(Was there someone from the earlier batch that you saw and felt had changed considerably over time?) I have not met a specific person like that. I also did not have any such conversation with them. But I have a habit that, while coming and going, I do look at everyone. I would see how much a person’s dress style has changed, how her ways of sitting, standing, living, and sharing have changed. If a village girl feels that everyone wears salwar kurta, then she wants to do the same, and then there is change in sensibility here. After MSK, you could see their confidence in making simple choices about how

they dressed and looked. They ran around a lot to get themselves admitted in class five at

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their nearby school. They used to talk with the teachers at MS to talk with their families

and help them get admission. They even wrote about how they didn’t want their gauna to

happen. Sometimes the in-laws used to forcibly take the women away. They didn’t agree

to their bahus getting extra education or their bahus getting education after the gauna took

place. That was disempowerment for some.

Non-Experience and Making a Case for Education

(I find it interesting that you never worked in education, but are now interested in creating an educational organization for girls. Why is that?) I chose the Naraini block in

Banda zila for my organization. It is like home. But my eyes were of a social worker who wanted to start a girls’ school, but also needed to ask specific questions to this regard. I used to stay at someone’s home when I was there, have food with them, and also ask questions regarding the girls’ education. I talked to the girls and their families. They often said that to send the girls outside of the village was considered bad. There are two to three girls who cycled to go the school in the nearby village. So I felt that they should be taught in their village so that their future also becomes secure.

I want to work on girls’ education, but not women’s. When the girls have an opportunity to study, then they can make certain choices about their future. Women anyway gather there when I go. I never have to call out for them. No one else has shown any interest in my work. I have talked much, even held meetings, but now I think there is no use. They don’t even give membership fees so that at least my travel expenses could come out of that. But how can one person do so much? I give my time generously and spend my own money. I can’t forcibly make anyone see my point of view.

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(So what about the sensibility that came through being a sahyogini, that it is possible to solve issues through debate and discussion?) It is no longer there. It is quite sad. What can I tell you? I get agitated just thinking about it. No one is ready to listen to me. They don’t care about what is happening and offer no insights. I think that, as long as they were in MS and knew they were getting a wage to do this kind of a job, they were fine. Once they were required to take their own initiative, where there was no set wages, then they refused to come forward.

(Is there a connection between education and empowerment?) Yes, there is a connection. (How will you measure empowerment? If you meet an MSK girl or one from your organization after five years, then how will you tell that her that the empowerment has occurred? Is this because of education or because of other factors? What will you see in her?) I will see that her “bol-caal” (how she walks and talks) is a little different. It’s in her social etiquette, sitting, eating, and talking that you know there is something different about this girl. (What do you mean by her dress style? Why is that a marker?) I have seen that when women generally take a “sidhaa-palla” (wear the floating end of the sari over the right shoulder), then they don’t put a pin there. But if it is an MSK girl, and she wears her sari with a sidhaa-palla, then she will always puts a pin on her shoulder. When you see this, then you know that this girl is from MSK. Her sense of social manners is also obvious. If you visit her, then she will come and lay the mat for you to sit on. She will get you something to eat as well. (But women everywhere are very hospitable. So that surely cannot be just because of MSK?) But the bahus (daughter-in-laws) never interacted socially with strangers. The mother-in-laws did. Now the bahus from MSK do all this

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social interaction as well. Now they sit down with us and ask why we have come. They have questions and certain keenness to know about everything.

Framing a Life: Empowerment equals Happiness

(If you see your life as a whole picture, from the beginning to now, what is the path you have taken and the identity you have created?) I am very happy. I feel that what my life is better than it was before. I am totally relaxed and tension-free right now. I can become tense, but I can learn to relax again. Earlier, I had a lot of family related tensions.

I have experienced a lot of violence in my life. I am not a domestic person. It confuses and irritates me. If I feel that I don’t want to wash or clean anything during a day, then I don’t do it. I give it to the dhobi (washerman) instead. Many times I don’t even iron my clothes and instead get them ironed from the outside. Even in my work, I feel that I want to be independent. I don’t want any restrictions.

(Is this the effect of MS on you?) When I was at MS, nothing was required of me in writing. I had the responsibility for 10 villages, and I had to decide for myself what my strategies would be. We discussed our strategies in meetings and then went from there.

There was more of a workload in the local NGO and here, there are no limits to what I can learn. I have to say that I have learned a lot from the didis. I learned about their perspective and their ways of doing things. They planned and organized their day so well.

Nothing was disturbed in that plan. No one was put through any kind of trouble. Every person who needed to reach somewhere reached there. Planning was also shared so that everyone knew what was happening. There was an economical use of time, money, and space. I liked that and want to be like that.

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Education and Supervisors’ Agency: An Analysis

The sahyoginis or the supervisors provide a more critical perspective on how a

program was institutionalized at the local level, not just as MSK. They participated in the

process of legitimizing and structuring the program through the particular efforts of the

sahyoginis and through their socialization into the discourse of education and

development. To put this another way, because the sahyoginis formatted the program’s

institutionalization and gave it a certain trajectory, they gained an objective, yet critical,

perspective on the process and its effects on women’s agency (individual or collective).

This perspective, like that of the sahelis, was generated in relation to the program’s

closure in 2001. The moment, initially baffling, was put into perspective through an analysis of programmatic integrity and management in recent years. Empowerment for and of women (how complete or incomplete it continues to be) is part of their larger discussion on institutionalization and bureaucratization of the program as interconnected processes.

In the process of building village level collectives or sanghas, the supervisors organized programmatic interventions at the grassroots, as well as at the district, level.

They manufactured consent for an intervention by identifying an issue at the village level that needed resolution, such as a broken water handpump. They organized people and discussion around the issue so that an issue-based intervention on behalf of the program could be constructed as well as legitimized. The handpump training at the district level

was therefore a result of the “articulated” (constructed) need of the women at the village

level.

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The sahyoginis also participated in stabilizing the relationship between the

women trainees and the trainers at the session. The women were illiterate and the trainers were male engineers who spoke an incomprehensible technical language. Both doubted

the women’s ability to be trained, but more so their physical capacity to handle the

equipment associated with the job. The sahyoginis allayed such fears through development of a new language of communication between the two parties. Technical

terms became visual representations. A pipe or “rod” was likened to a tall woman in the

group and consequently her name replaced the technical name for the component in

question. This learning process eased the relationship and helped make the training a success.

The handpump training project catapulted the program into regional and national prominence. Its institutional identity at the district level was cemented with this training.

The program could claim that the training empowered low caste women at two levels: it gave them self-confidence in their newly acquired ability and this ability, in turn, served to question caste and gender based politics around water and water resources. A social revolution was claimed in every instance that a low caste mechanic fixed a broken

handpump in an upper caste locality or home and got invited to tea by the headman.

In a context in which social space is organized along caste lines and caste-based

etiquette requires that physical distance be maintained between the upper and lower

castes, an intercaste and intergender interaction can indeed seem revolutionary. Did

women’s new technical expertise finally create the space and within it the possibility of

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intercaste dialogue? In other words, did the empowerment of a few empower a whole

community? The answer is no.

Patriarchies of caste, class, and religion sustain over time because of their ability

to reconfigure and adapt to changing social realities. Training women to be handpump mechanics was indeed a radical idea because it was never transacted before. It displaced a

biologically deterministic definition of female capacity or lack of it while condemning

and altering social practices that fed a gender myth. However, inviting the mechanics to

tea after they fixed the handpump did not automatically result in collegial relations

between castes or in an articulated need to dismantle obstacles to a community-based

dialogue. The mechanics were selling a service that no one else, including the

government, would and for which there were upper caste and lower caste buyers alike.

The women’s low caste status was sidelined in face of their skill. The latter served

to regain access to and control over water resources, which a harking on the former could

not accomplish. Further, inviting the women for tea did not mean that the tea would be

drunk as equals or that now more social relationship was possible between castes. The

mechanics could easily be seated at the door or at the foot of the platform or chair on

which the headman resided, as they drank their tea. This could happen as easily when

another low caste woman covers her face as she passes the headman’s house from across

the beaten path.

A radical intervention such as the training held radical possibilities. But a radical intervention must be sustained if such radical possibilities are to be realized in some measure. There is a greater chance for a radical intervention to be eulogized and become

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larger than the life that is struggling to embody it. The euphoria of instituting an intervention may get identified with its assured success, even before its success can be measured in real terms and real lives. Why is it that the 42 mechanics from the first training never formed an independent collective (separate from MS) that would help them protect their own interests? Why did the “group” finally fragment and the training no longer came to define their principal identities in the local context? Why did they instead

“return” to their original duties as mother, wife, and paid agricultural labor and only seldom did handpump repair?

The same applies to the masonry project, in which women were trained to build houses, but a collective never formed nor did the project sustain for long. Again, this was a radical project that forged women’s construction skills, but towards economic profit.

Women in villages build their own huts; thus, to direct this skill towards building houses on contract was not too much of a stretch. It required some convincing on part of the sahyoginis, but the women were agreeable. But like the handpump training, the masonry project added to women’s work burden. They worked on every aspect of the project, including hauling stones on their heads from one site to another or from one level to another within the same site.

Women never complain because they are socialized never to articulate their own discomfort. So they protested the training in terms of the fears that came with learning new things and what it meant in terms of their social relations. They expressed their inability to do everything new, from filling the foundation to raising the walls of a house, along with their traditional task of hauling stones to the building site. However, such

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protestations were absorbed within the program and ignored as reflex reactions to a new

intervention and not necessarily seen as its critique.

Therefore, for the training, the promise of change was largely a rhetorical strategy

for enlisting women. If the promise was more real, then the training would have sustained

and new strategies towards forging women’s technical literacy and collectivity would

have emerged. In the words of the sahyoginis, they had helped develop such interventions

and therefore took responsibility for institutionalizing the program through them.

However, the “failure” of the training is shed off as the problem of the other, the subjects

who lacked the foresight to develop it further. Failure is also cited as an inevitability,

where the people and the program move on and where the sahyoginis themselves moved

out and on with different agendas.

Even as their personal movement away from the program and into different other

projects/institutions is rationalized as “progress” and as their “intellectual development,”

the program’s closure in 2001 is considered critically. It can be argued that, when the

sahyoginis participated in the institutionalization of the program through the particular

types of training, they also contributed to a problematic relationship between the program

and the subject women. This ultimately posed problems for women’s agency and empowerment in the local context. Even as the sahyoginis articulate these problems in their definitions of empowerment, it is principally relative to the program’s role in their lives and the lives of other sahyoginis. Their own role in problematizing empowerment for other women, as part of their programmatic responsibility, is not discussed. Instead the onus is laid on the agents, who failed to understand the mandate of the program, and

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on the program and coordinators, in the latter phase of the program’s operation, who failed to keep track of the shifting needs and expectations of the program.

For this group of sahyoginis then, empowerment is the difference between

“aatmasaath” (siding with oneself) and “samajh” (understanding). A woman is truly empowered if she can transfer her understanding of intersectionalities of gender, religion, and caste to herself and accordingly reject the ways these operate to subordinate her.

Instead, if she continues to seek self-gratification and social approval in the production of a son, then she (and not the program) has failed in using the debates on patriarchy to question the social norm. The program, according to them, has therefore failed the women because it lost its initial focus. It came under the control of coordinators, who unlike their former counterparts, possessed no feminist sensibilities or commitment to feminist politics. They only served to transform a government mandated program into a government program and brought to it all the problems of bureaucratization, especially corruption. The program then closed as a result.

The question that is still not asked is how the program came to such a state of mismanagement and by women who understood government style maintenance, but not feminist creativity. Is mismanagement the responsibility only of the elites who arrived later into the program and not of those who had crafted its mandate and training initially, but considered no strategies to sustain the program’s identity for the future? What of the accountability of those who initiated the program but did not have either the energy or the inclination in later years to fight for its identity as a woman’s program, owned by women? What of the accountability of the women’s movement, academics, and NGOs to

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safeguard the programmatic identity as it was conceived in policy? The sahyoginis also, like the coordinators, could reflect on their own empowerment and find other means to sustain themselves in the future. They did not have to think deeply about the fate of those

on whose transformation was built their personal resumes.

In these local level configurations between agency and intervention, we also can

locate the critique of the national and international development framework that enlists

and invites, yet abandons and reconfigures itself without the consent of those it initially

used to stabilize itself. But in this critique is also an unarticulated need to belong to the

framework and to perpetuate it similarly or differently. One of the sahyoginis had joined

a local NGO. The other sahyogini sought the help of the NGO coordinators, as well as a

former MS coordinator, to write proposals for an educational initiative for young girls

locally. She confessed that she liked the NGO style of working and admired her former

bosses for their organizational skills. She liked the modernity of this developmental

institution and wanted to be immersed in it. This shows how the program had helped trickle the rationality of development across levels of responsibility, stabilized it, and created agents of its perpetuation. The sahyoginis were such agents because they had already experienced the process of institutionalization of the program and their agency was connected to structuring, supervising, and evaluating its effects on local subjects of the intervention. They were thus suitable for owning and controlling the NGO-ization process at the district level, even if it was not in the form of a program.

In summary, empowerment for the sahyoginis was seen in developing women’s collectivity at the village level, though not of their own group. Although they believed in

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the power of collectivity to change social reality, they did not apply this belief to their own group. Their own individual empowerment lay in traveling to villages and forging sanghas at that level. The social effects of such a collectivity on social relations helped the sahyoginis make changes in their own lives or at least to question their lives in fundamental ways.

The sahyoginis preferred singlehood and happiness resulting from such a state.

They preferred self-identification to just knowledge about its possibilities. Non- institutionalized education, to them, was the reason that they had different sensibilities than the sahelis or the learners. However, here they also contradict themselves. While they place their own empowerment in the realm of training or work that was non- institutionalized, they first identify MSK with adolescent girls (when, in fact, it started as a school for women) and then locate their empowerment in their newly acquired social etiquette. How the women dress, talk, and behave socially are the markers of their reformed status, according to the sahyogini.

Education as a strategy to reform social bodies, especially low caste bodies, finds expression in the words of a program functionary in 21st century India, as it did in the discourse of nationalism and colonialism in the 19th century. Further, the sahyoginis want to reproduce the MSK experience for the girls by setting up their own NGOs for this purpose. They take their inspiration from the institutionalization efforts of their didis

(program coordinators) as a means to replicate it in their own hometowns, villages, and blocks. The institutionalization imperative then applied to the sahyoginis as well, even as

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they remained external to the actual educational interventions in MS and observed clear examples of successful collectivized struggles at the village level.

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CHAPTER 5

INSTITUTIONALIZING EDUCATION/IMPLEMENTING A POLICY:

THE COORDINATORS’ EXPERIENCES

Velvet Purses and Riding with MK

As I sat in the rickshaa to go to the MS office from the KL office (a local women’s newspaper), I realized that I was thirsty and hungry. I wanted to wait until we reached the office because there was no way I could have drunk water successfully while bouncing up and down on the seat on that rickety rickshaa. Suddenly we were passing by rows, on either side of the road, full of makeshift shops with brightly colored ribbons, small velvet purses and wallets, strings of multicolored bangles, sarees, and small silver trinkets. Suddenly, I wanted to get down from the rickshaa and shop. I realized that I had no wallet where I could keep my change, and this was a good place to acquire one. So I got off and paid the rickshaa driver.

The shopkeepers were primarily women of all ages—adolescent girls, married women, and old women. When I asked them the prices of the velvet purses, they first looked very strangely at me—my salwar-kurta and my “white skin” (the non-sunburned) gave away my identity as an outsider. They wanted to immediately know where I had come from. I said, “Delhi,” and upon hearing that, they immediately asked me if I was staying with MK, a didi. Everyone knows MK in Chitrakoot. She was the first coordinator of the MS program and had made herself fairly well known in the region through her work. In the process, she has ruffled many feathers and made enemies as well, especially with the influential, patriarchal, politically connected, upper caste, rich

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men in Chitrakoot, who resented her work with the low caste women. Yet Chitrakoot has remained MK’s home, and people in Karwi know this. The women proceeded to show me a few purses. I chose a red one and paid 10 rupees for it. As I walked on towards the

MS office, I felt happy with my purchase.

A jeep honked behind me. I knew that I was not walking in the middle of the road. I looked around and found three faces looking out of the windows of the jeep at me, laughing. I recognized MK’s laughter before I recognized her. She asked me: “What are you doing here? Are you coming to the office? Is this your day out?” Three quick questions were fired at me, to which I simply said “yes.” I hopped into the jeep with her, assuming that she was headed to her office. As the jeep turned around, at first I didn’t notice that it was headed in the opposite direction. MK was headed to a village on the outskirts of Chitrakoot for a meeting. She was taking two people along with her and asked me if I wanted to come along. Otherwise they could turn the jeep back around and drop me at the office. I didn’t want them to do that. Additionally, this seemed like a good opportunity to chitchat about different things. I could talk a little bit about my work to her and get her views on the current state of MS in Chitrakoot, if she was indeed keeping up with her former program. She was MS Banda’s first coordinator.

The Return of Micro-credit

The new focus at the end of the 1990s was no longer education, but income- generation, a return to the pre-1985 conceptual frameworks that emphasized the importance of economic independence as crucial to rural women’s empowerment. The

Dutch already had committed themselves to moving out of the Chitrakoot district by

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2000, and this allowed the World Bank to show interest in agricultural projects with and training for women farmers, under the aegis of the MS structure. The sangha structure, comprised of rural women at the village level, who were also farmers and agricultural laborers by profession, was seen as ideal for the launch of agricultural training in the manner instituted during the green revolution in the late 1960s. The difference was that now the focus and recipients of the training were rural women. The problem was that the women were assumed to be illiterate and untrained in matters of agricultural production.

Their experiential knowledge was paid lip service, with the intention of introducing a new and “scientific” way of producing crops and of selling them collectively in the market place for a collective profit sharing.

Simultaneous with this was the government of India’s “swa-shakti” program that again wanted to use the MS structure for transforming the local sanghas into self-help groups. The assumption was that, for the sangha women, because they had existed as a collective for some time and shared a degree of personal bonding, income generation would not be a problem. The only help they would need would be from NGOs in the form of training, critical input, monitoring of group activities, and any other form of support needed for the smooth functioning of the groups in their everyday endeavors.

The local NGO promoted micro-credit with the belief that training in the art of income-generation, for the specific purpose of setting up businesses for profit, did not require literacy. The NGO’s argument was that people did not require formal math classes to know how to keep accounts. The NGO was trying to reject the importance of literacy, even when it was obvious and articulated at the grassroots level within the

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context of self-help. In my observations of the process of evaluating and improving the

self-help groups in one village, Biyur, 15 miles from Chitrakoot, I saw the problems with

self-help schemes being engrafted onto a sangha that was built for a different purpose and

the ignoring of the literacy needed to foster the relationship (between microcredit and the sanghas). Following are some detailed impressions drawn from the questionnaires,4

completed to date, and observations of the researchers recorded in these questionnaires:

1. Women are not able calculate the interest on loans.

2. Women have some idea of individual savings, but not of the group savings

3. The process of lending is not clear or when do people take loans, if at all.

4. The mediator does not know how to mediate or how to understand the

problems that arise from the collective regarding bachat (savings). Tensions persist

regarding the feasibility and effectiveness of savings. Some want to end the scheme

because they do not see any “fayada” in it. In addition, they do not see the possibility of a

future in saving money every month. Others want to continue with it for unspelt and

unforeseen needs that may arise.

5. It is assumed that women know the rules of bachat, yet they also claim to have

forgotten them. Group leadership is relegated to going to the bank for bachat. Members

also are concerned with the details of their bachat. How well does this work in the

context of details about social mobility and collectivizing of local women in their village

vis à vis particular issues? Is social empowerment unconnected to bachat or is their time

lag in connection between the two? Even if we want to make a case for bachat as a tool

4 The questionnaires here refer to a written set of questions (general and specific) developed by the local

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for the social empowerment of women, do we have research material to make such a

claim? And if we cannot make such a claim, how do we begin to rethink a critique of

education-centered interventions such as Mahila Samakhaya and its ability or lack thereof

to bring about social changes expected of it? Interestingly, in the case of the sanghas

within Mahila Samakhaya, a space was created for literacy and educational needs to be

articulated. But in the case of bachat, even when the need is articulated in the course of

saying what problems women encounter in this context, it is critiqued as was done in

biyur. In other words, if MS specifically used collectivizing around issues of water

scarcity as a way for women to articulate the importance and use of literacy herein,

bachat is understood differently. Here too women’s collectives are being formed for

initiating bachat schemes. However, when the need for literacy is articulated, even to do

basic functions required of the scheme, such as keeping records, it is ignored or denied to

the women, even though it is the everyday tool for the local NGO to track and review the

bachat groups, as well as keep records of the bachat)

6. The role of each member is not clear. They do not want to be involved beyond

the point of saving and depositing their amounts.

7. The dependency relationship with the local NGO is highlighted. A dependency

relationship here means that, to solve problems of recording the meetings, disputes over

savings and over how much money is given away for karz (loan), or even to improve the

dynamics between group members, the local NGO is seen as key. The group’s own

thinking on the nature of the group dynamics and on improving it is interrupted by

NGO activists involved with the income-generation project and with writing their final report based on the

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knowing that this job is the local NGO’s, not theirs. This “comfort zone” then removes

members from a sense of ownership about the group.

8. Sometimes there is punishment prescribed for not depositing the karz on time,

although the nature or extent of the punishment is not clear. Another striking revelation in

the questionnaires is the response to the question “what are the different ‘tarikaas’ (ways) to return the karz?” In some places, the responses are listed as “selling the house, things in the house, khetii (agricultural land) or son’s expected savings on his return.”

Reviewers seemed taken aback by these responses when they were asked to comment.

Their explanation was that such situations have not arisen and such possibilities only exist as such. But again, there is a need to examine why such possibilities are entertained, what their consequences, if realized, may be on women and their families, and why (if at all) such possibilities run counter to the idea of bachat and its celebration as an empowering tool.

9. The two questions in the survey “what is the solution to the problem of not saving within the group?” and “who solves problems?” need to be juxtaposed for analysis. For the women, when the group was not saving for some time (four to seven months), the solution to the lack of cohesion and understanding was to close the bachat down. Yet, when asked who solves problems within the group, the leaders were pointed to. But it is still not clear what the methods of solution are, what the solution is to this specific problem, if at all. Here, the researcher/reviewer also needs to identify what the problem is and what then is its solution. For example, if the group said that one problem

responses to the questionnaires. 142

within the group was that they uttered gaalis (abuses) during group meetings and the solution is that they no longer do, then what is this an indicator of? Setting terms for relationships in the group? Would this then be an important indicator of “badlav”

(change) in the group or, in Marxist terms, a group by itself changing into a group for itself?

10. Mobility regarding the bachat is restricted to the core members and leaders.

This may easily be their role, not the other members’, to perform, but we also need to understand the reasons that members give for not accompanying the leaders to the bank, even if just to see where the bank is and understand its various procedures. For example, if one of the reasons for women not going to the bank is that they do not get permission to do so from their family, then not only does one need to examine the familial resistance to such mobility, but one also need to identify instances where women do not customarily ask for permission to work, such as in the case of getting wood or taking the animals for

“chara” (fodder). Such instances may then provide ideas for how group ownership can be experienced. In Biyur, for example, the women linked education to women’s mobility, using the reviewers as the classic examples. “See, you are educated and therefore can come and go everywhere without hesitation. We do not have that luxury.” This equation also seems to conflate knowing (the world) and decision-making (about mobility through and between different social spaces and norms). But this not paid heed to by the NGO and the reviewers.

11. Among the reviewers, literacy is not considered critical to leadership. The argument is that, in groups headed by MSK girls and women, leadership in terms of

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vision for the group and taking up village-level issues is lacking. As such, education is

not equal to leadership. But then the opposite is also not visible in Biyur. Illiterate

women, who predominate in the collectives, also have not shown remarkable leadership

in creating and sustaining their groups. The contradiction that is foregrounded here only

highlights the importance of literacy inputs, with bachat as its primary focus, and that

MSK, despite being considered the epitome of empowerment of women through education, is still a particular initiative whose educational components may not be fully suited for an intervention such as bachat, which requires specialized knowledge.

Therefore, bachat requires leadership training through literacy, but this is not according to

the reviewers.

12. In the group in Biyur, there appears to be confusion about terms such as

“fayadaa” (profit) and “meeting.” One woman said that, through bachat, she had hoped to

get a free rickshaa or even a tempo (a three-wheeler). Another woman said, the idea of a

free rickshaa was replaced by the assertion that bachat money could be used to buy a

rickshaa and then the money is returned at a lesser rate of interest than that initially set by

the money lender. The other assumed fayadaa of doing bachat seemed like an incentive

provided by the local NGO. Some women had thought that they would get a “tankii”

(water tank or reservoir) if they adopted the bachat scheme and, since then, have wondered why the tankii has not yet been built.

While this assumption was corrected as merely an assumption by the reviewers, it still warrants the question of why the idea of laabh has been external to the idea and essence of the group and its bachat activities. Do the group members not understand the

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consequences of the bachat or even the possibilities it provides to increase economic well

being? Why, in the case of one woman member in Biyur, is laabh a counterfactual or the

fayadaa of bachat ultimately may not be in the economic activities it generates, but in the

fact that women had finally saved money in the bank and had passbooks to prove this?

Do we at all want to entertain this idea (of savings) as an important indicator of women’s empowerment in the context of bachat? Similarly, how can we begin to understand the

contention that the fayadaa of the samooh is to collectively put forth problems to the

reviewers and seek their advice in the matter? Can this be simultaneously seen as an indicator of women beginning to see themselves as a group and an indication of the levels of dependency on an external organization interspersed with lack of “soch” and the need for independent decision-making as a group about the group? Does this contradiction then allow for reviewers to reconsider their role in the field and the kinds of input (e.g., specialized information) required to develop group cohesion?

Additionally, the reviewers seemed a little unclear about how they were progressing with bachat in their field, previously occupied by swa-shakti, a self-help scheme of the government of India. They seemed to see their model as different from the swa-shakti model, primarily in terms of their model as non-governmental. Yet what constitutes the difference in terms of the components of the model was not made clear in the conversation. If this is a lack of clarity, then this needs to be corrected before

evaluations are used to promote certain groups, and not others, or even before talks of

federating the groups are operationalized.

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Empowerment as Access to Government Programs or Empowerment as a Right

Examining the Boundaries of an Innovative Program

While at MK’s home in Karwi, she asked me if I wanted her to talk excitedly or critically about the program. I wanted her to do both, if she could. For her, there was a time and space that was exciting and a time and space in which to be critical. Initially, we had the space to figure out how we wanted to conceptualize education and empowerment.

But there came a time when any new government program was to be integrated into ongoing activities. Even with the swa-shakti (self-empowerment) program that we had become involved with, the program originators wanted us to carry red books (books on reproduction and birth control) into the field and to keep one in all the literacy centers.

There is no space to critically examine the directives or to even say that we do not want to be part of this convergence (of different government programs into one program).

I believe that there is a difference between being a middleman for the government and being a middleman for the women. We needed to play a different role than that of the honest broker. We needed to question our roles. We have played this role for a long time and have thought empowerment to be expressed in rural women accessing information and negotiating with the government. Empowerment was never conceptualized as entitlement to information or even women’s land rights. The rights perspective was completely lacking in our orientation.

Rather than ask the larger questions of our rights and identity, initially, in the MS, forming a women’s sangha in the village was our priority. It was not negotiation with the pradhan, the headman, which allowed such a collective to be formed. Now in swa-shakti,

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what is given primacy is not group formation, but negotiations with persons of power

such as the pradhan. We must tell the pradhan what the project is and get him involved in

the process. So, in this context, what is empowerment and for whom? Even in the

program, it seems right that a group must form, it must find its voice and clarity of

purpose, and demand its right to land, for example. But even this right to land has to be

demanded in such a way that the status quo is not questioned.

The women were not expected to question the power structure, but rather generate

its assent for any intervention. There was no questioning the power structure, from which

stemmed other issues such as caste-based, practice of untouchability that also lay at the heart of inequality in the land structure. Staying within your “dayaraa” (the boundaries)

was always the implicit idea. (But, I said, that is strange. MS, or rather the document,

says that the women should have the space to critically examine their context and

therefore change it. I am wondering where the stoppages occurred.). Well, said MK, there

was no rights perspective given to us in any training. The understanding was that the poor

must have rights to forests and land; they should have good mazdoori (wage labor), but

somehow, in a particular context, we didn’t question it then. We should have questioned

it more, especially issues of caste and class.

(Dis)Empowerment is Governmental Benevolence

In our initial model of the sakhi training, the critical analysis framework was not

there. Instead, there was spoon feeding. Give (women) “kirayaa” (travel fare), get good

food at the training, and that completed our responsibility. This is understandable because

women needed space out of their contexts, to get the luxuries they never had, but this

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killed the andolan (movement). Dependency on the program somehow continued to grow, rather than decrease. Initially, we understood that if training sessions for women were done in the village, then the women might not be able to speak their mind, surrounded by family and by men within and outside their household. It was worth conducting training away from the village, even if it was expensive to do so. Back then, we didn’t think of it. For our padayatra, for communal harmony, we collected “chanda”

(donations) and the people in the village cooked food for the padyatris (footmarchers) through that chanda.

In MS, we never thought about it. We would just give money because we had the money to do what we wanted. Now that I think of it, this was sort of an “an-data”

(provider) relationship. Whether it was the sakhis or the sahyoginis, it was expected that

“we would go outside of Karwi, eat good food, and stay in a nice place.” I am not saying that there is no value to doing training outside and pampering the women. But if you look at the cost-benefit analysis, then even the MSK needs to be questioned. When things are carried on out of a lived context, then what happens? After a certain point, they don’t want to do training, except in nice locales. People are human beings. It becomes that training and the benefits associated with it are the end, rather than the fact that we were just giving them the space outside of their context to interact and to engage with each other.

Now former MS employees in other regions have become sarkaarii

(governmental). The coordinator in Pratapgarh was an MS Banda sahyogini, who could not do without the jeep. She had to take the jeep everywhere. Sahyoginis used to wait for

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the jeep to come for them wherever they were in the field and then fight about who would sit in the front. MS became corrupt later. Why do you think they shut down here in

Chitrakoot? There was a 10 lakh “gaman” (embezzlement) here. In MS Benaras and MS

Saharanpur, there was again ghaplaa (fraud) that was close to 4 lakhs. People were being thrown out. But the maximum ghaplaa was in Chitrakoot. From the top to the bottom, everyone admitted that they took their cuts.

Therefore, what is empowerment? Is an empowered woman a corrupt adhikari

(official)? What are we talking about? (Here I interjected and asked MK to talk a little about the initial part, the exciting part of MS. Did you have any idea about what you wanted to do in the program, when you joined?). No, I did not have an idea of how to start or implement a program. Then we had this horrible director of education who was initially our boss and who kept referring to us as “bitches.” He was the first (although temporary) head of MS in 1989. He was an interim chief because there was no state program director until 1991. In fact, in a meeting, this horrible man actually said that

“these village women are like wild bitches and the town women are like domesticated bitches.” He said this to our face in a meeting. Of course, we were offended. We protested, shouted him down. But the good thing was that we didn’t have to deal with him everyday or report to him much. We were left to do what we wanted to do with the program because we had the support of the creators of the program, such as VR and AB.

The great thing, I think, was that we had the freedom and the money to run the program as we wanted.

Operationalizing a Program: The Question of Field, Self, and Safety

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To us in Chitrakoot, water was an issue. Initially there was a lot of discussion

about empowering women in matters of water. We wanted to train women to be

mechanics so that they could take control of the problem. But others in the movement did

not warm up to the idea. They argued that women would labor under a double burden.

But we knew that this had never been tried before and, without trying it once, what did

we know? We had complete freedom to launch our idea. The whole thing about jumping

into action without thought or understanding of what we are doing, what kind of

precedent was being set up, becomes problematic over time. Once this barber tried to

sexually assault this girl and when we learned about this, we looked for him and then beat

him up. We didn’t think for a moment about the legal repercussions of what we were

doing.

Initially, we didn’t have a vehicle or an office. The struggle was with this NGO,

through which the program was introduced to the region or the Akhil Bharatiya Samaj

Sewa Sansthaa (ABSSS). Bhaiji’s, the coordinator for the NGO, idea of feminism was

women becoming durga, becoming kali. It was all very communal, very patriarchal, and

very abusive towards women. It took us some time to move out from under his shadow. It

was a huge challenge to get women out of their homes and interested in the program, to even listen to what it may offer, define what they needed from the program, and be

assured that this indeed could be achieved.

So while this was going on, what do you say to people? What were we actually achieving? We were just travelers going from one village to another. We got identified as the salwar-kurta women, who roamed the villages to talk to women. But gradually there

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were results from all our relationship building efforts. Small things started to happen,

such as ration cards getting made and handpumps getting fixed. We began to respond

emotionally to women’s such-dukh (joys and sorrows). If somebody’s husband was

beating her, then we intervened to ensure that he changed his ways.

But we were still the outsiders. There were constant questions about what we

were doing in the program. I used to constantly that I was not at home in the environment

and wanted to run back to Delhi. To accept Banda and to be accepted there has been a

long hard struggle. But people in Delhi believed in us and that is why we stayed. They let us figure out our issues in the field, clarify them, and then also implement them in the

ways we wanted to. It was indeed nice to know that those at the top trusted us without

monitoring us in debilitating ways.

A Story Unfinished

(At this point I interjected and wanted MK to talk a little bit about how the

handpump project came about. Was it a well thought out strategy or just an idea that took

concrete shape as it was put into practice?) But I got no answer, as MK was urgently called for a meeting that she forgot about while talking to me. So off she went in a hurry, apologizing over and over again for not “finishing” the interview. I would have loved her

to stay, but I had mentioned to her earlier that the interview was not of a set duration. It would go on as per her convenience and anytime that something came up that required greater attention, the interview would end there as it did at that moment.

There were, of course, many interruptions in the interviews (children fighting over chocolate and toys, a breakdown of electricity, and the heavy sound of the fan

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running under an inverter), but the threads of conversation could still be picked up at

different moments. MK is a busy woman. So the interview that I did get with her proved

to be valuable because, after that, she was extremely busy or traveling to different places.

I did not despair about the last question because I knew that AS, her friend and co-

worker, would nicely fill in the pieces of the puzzle regarding the strategy that made MS

Chitrakoot famous, along with MK.

AS: The Activist and Coordinator5

Introduction

AS did her MA in Hindi from Allahabad University, a fairly well known university in U.P. While finishing her MA here, she became interested in social work and applied for a job that required spreading educational consciousness in the Bastis (slums) around Allahabad. However, there was nobody to explain what this consciousness meant and why the bastis in particular needed it. Instead, she ended up doing clerical work there. She was introduced to the MS program through Bhaiji of ABSSS. He was known in the region as “pitaji” (father). He has worked with land and fair wage issues and seemed fairly progressive in upholding women’s rights.

In 1989, when the MS was created and program directors such as VR scouted for

NGOs that were based in areas through which the program could be introduced, ABSSS was the default choice. He then scouted for women who would be interested in the program. At the Kumbh Mela in Allahabad in 1991, where Hindus pilgrims from

5 AS moved to Delhi in 2000. She began work with an NGOin Delhi. Later, she became the coordinator of the education program in the Lalitpur district of Uttar-Pradesh. She died on May 13, 2004 in an accident in Lalitpur. The feminist-activist-research world lost its biggest star and its most tireless worker. I have her written permission to print this interview. 152

different parts of the country arrive to take the holy dip in the sangam (the confluence of

three major rivers—Ganga, Yamuna, and Brahmputra), the University had set up its own

stall. AS was spotted there by Bhaiji. She agreed to join and moved to Manikpur where the ABSSS office was located. She was paid a salary of Rs. 750. She was told what she had to do, as Bhaiji decided everyone’s responsibility. He sent a bodyguard with the

sahyoginis, everywhere they went.

In the villages, people were very hesitant to speak, but then slowly began to talk

about themselves, about weddings in the family, problems in the villages, mazdoori,

water problems, children’s education, and so forth. The idea was to get people to talk

about education and related issues so that the program could be introduced and explained.

Between February 1989 and June 1990, the local NGO introduced the program to

the region. But there were many problems with this relationship. AS admitted to doing

everything she was asked to do at the NGO, without really thinking for herself. MS was a

program for women, but its gendered aspects were never really made clear or discussed.

After the first year, MS was separated from ABSSS. MS Banda was registered as an

independent society and its first office was set up in Karwi. Karwi was midway between

the Banda and Manikpur blocks, where the program was to be operationalized. AS

became the district resource person, even as one sahyogini left the program, and the

other became the office assistant. Later, more sahyoginis were selected and trained for

MS.

Demanding Literacy or Creating a Demand for Literacy?

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The entry point for the program in the villages was water. The government had

initially installed 700 handpumps in the region, many of which did not work. The Jal

Nigam in Karwi had only three technicians to service the whole region, making the repair

work in the region a near impossibility. Additionally, that there were just three

technicians only pointed to the fact that the government had spent a limited amount of

time on evaluating the total work hours required to service the handpumps in the region

and thereby exhibited their apathy about the needs of the people. This became the issue

around which women’s collectivities were designed.

Initially, the “illiterate women” were disallowed from either picketing or

protesting before the office of BDO. But later, they were allowed inside the office, only because they had a written “arzi” (petition) with the MS stamp on it. The first time around, the women were asked to come in, were given tea, and the BDO signed the arzi.

He also added that he was asking the Jal Nigam to install a handpump in the tribal area.

The women came back happy. But the BDO had, in fact, written nothing on the paper that proved his verbal promise to them. He had just signed the arzi with “received” stamped on it and that was it. The women had been fooled, and this was all because they were illiterate; they couldn’t tally the verbal promise with what the BDO wrote on the paper.

This event brought home the realization that literacy is important, even for a basic interaction with the government. For the longest time, being able to sign one’s own name was equivalent to total literacy. But in a signature, there are only so many letters that you

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can recognize. As soon as the same letters are introduced in another name, they become unrecognizable and confusing. Literacy camps followed from this experience.

Handpump Training and Literacy

In the meantime, MK became very focused on handpump training. She wanted the same illiterate women to participate in the training and become handpump mechanics.

Thus, she enlisted Jal Nigam and UNICEF to help organize the training. AS helped in the process by focusing on simplifying the technicalities of the handpump and its procedures.

There were initially 42 handpump training sessions and some of the women who were trained had to repair almost 15 handpumps by themselves or as a group after the training was complete.

At that time, D.P. Vaish from UNICEF oversaw the water project, which was to be begun in the Bundelkhand region, of which Banda and Karwi are subdivisions. The water board in Karwi was headed by B. Sharma, and he had a junior engineer, AM, who later became involved with training the women to be mechanics. The handpumps that were being used then were India Mark 1 and 2. Both were considered difficult to repair.

Thus, if one broke down, it remained thus because it required many hours of work to fix it, especially with an understaffed jal nigam. The problem was that the lever that connected the two 20-meter iron pipes into the bored ground was somewhere in the middle or at least 20 meters from the ground. To repair the lever meant that the first pipe would need to be removed, the lever taken out and repaired, and then everything replaced again. This was indeed a tedious process for anyone.

Handpump Training and Gendered Notions of Women’s Load Bearing Capacities

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UNICEF and Jal Nigam proposed the use of India Mark 3. The choice was clearly

not determined by consideration for the weaker sex. The men still thought it impossible

for women to even lift any of the pipes, let alone install them. Such assumptions about the physical weakness of rural women were made and articulated despite the fact that women engaged in extreme physical labor everyday. The tribal Kol women cart about 30

to 50 pounds of firewood on their head over distances that can range between 10 and 25

miles. They may use the train to cart these woods from one district to another, but even to

board the train with such a load in a matter of 45 seconds (which is the most any train

stops at the Chitrakoot station) and disembark before the train leaves is neither an easy

nor safe task. There have been instances in which the women could not disembark or

slipped while disembarking and hurt themselves badly. There was one particularly bizarre

instance of a woman slipping on to the train tracks even as the train started to come to a

halt and losing a leg underneath the wheels.

The Jal Nigam men failed to acknowledge that if the women could lift pounds of

wood and cart them across miles, what were 20- or 30-foot iron pipes? It was at the

mechanics’ training that the women showed the men how wrong they were. They showed

that they not only could lift and load heavy pipes, but also ride the bicycle effortlessly

with the pipes. The Jal Nigam had also displayed its skepticism regarding the women’s

ability to learn the mechanics of the handpump repair and installation. The men didn’t

think that the illiterate Kol women had any intellectual capacity to learn a technical

process. This may be because they never really saw women in their family work as

engineers or do any work described as “technical” in the vocabulary of the male-

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dominated society. This perspective was reinforced by a deep-seated sense of caste hierarchy. The men in Jal nigam had last names such as Mishra and Sharma and were therefore high caste Brahmins. No one is more patriarchal than the Brahmins. They are also the ones who rigidly maintain caste boundaries. Generally, those in the low caste are also the low class and, in urban spaces, they work as household help. But even as household help, they are involved with work that requires cleaning bathrooms, sweeping and polishing the floors, and taking out the trash. They are not allowed access to the kitchen, where the food for the family is handled and prepared.

A Personal Aside on Caste

Purity and pollution associated with the caste-system is thus practiced everyday.

To me, that the caste system is unchanging is not because it has existed in our social system for so long, but because certain people, especially those “born” into a caste that is considered “higher” or representative of some god-like entity, do things to others, on a daily basis, that keeps the differences intact. Their practice also includes the use of violence. Every day, there are new words (or the same words) that cut, slice, and humiliate. There are new or the same violent gestures, accompanied by threats of more violence and more injury. Then there are times when violence is actually inflicted on the abhorred body. Interestingly, the low caste women are often the primary victims of such violence, not the men. If the premise of patriarchy is that women are weaker than men and if the way maleness is institutionalized over time is through reflecting on and controlling the other, or femaleness, then this premise resonates with other premises in the form of caste-hierarchy.

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You are born in a caste. You never go beyond your caste in the sense that you cannot discard it, you cannot marry outside of it, and you cannot deny it because it is embedded in your surname. If you are born in a higher caste, it is your “good fortune” because of the power it allows you by virtue of that position. If you are born in a lower caste, it is your “bad fortune” because of the powerlessness that you will have to deal with by virtue of that position. Upper caste, rich men control women in their family by treating them as disposable property, as non-paid workers, as producers of the next generation of that particular family and caste, even through the threat or actual use of violence for nothing in particular, but for a little of everything in general.

The same men will aggressively maintain caste-boundaries or show the other or the low caste its place in the hierarchy, and thereby its state of powerlessness and helplessness, through violence against “their” women. If women are the bearers of the community respect and its “pure” perpetuation is ensured through control over their mobility and social interaction, then what better way to control other castes than to demean and threaten low caste women?

In the demeaning of the low caste women as women without “morals” because they are mobile and economically active, often without the support of men, the upper caste patriarchy re-establishes itself again and again. The men in the jal nigam and their skepticism towards low caste women’s capacity to learn and have technical power similar to theirs needs to be located at the intersection of caste and patriarchy. Alternatively, the eagerness with which the Kol women took on the task of handpump training, once they were able to negotiate the hurdles of understanding a technical language in terms of their

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own language, disproved the biological or celestial basis for rejecting women’s capacity

to learn new things. The women were not only able to show the Jal Nigam men what they

were capable of, but also show the men in villages.

Initially, the village Pradhan or head would not allow these low caste women to

touch the handpumps in his compound or even the village, even if they desperately

needed repair. However, when they saw that the women were the only ones who could

repair the handpumps and that somehow having water in their handpump was worth more

than sticking to caste prescriptions, they gave in. Additionally, the men were far too intrigued with the idea of women repairing a handpump to give up an opportunity to really see if their capabilities were a reality. By giving in, the men also made sure that

they also got to witness first-hand a woman fail at what she traditionally was not

expected to succeed at. The women did not fail and the men did not get to laugh at them.

Instead, they were given begrudging respect and finally the term “mechanic,” a term that

until now was male gendered, was attributed to them. Culturally, the women were now

men and were given their due as any man would have been in their position and with

their skills. Alternately, this can be seen as the feminization of a culturally male term.

Feminization of Bidi Making: The Problem of Caste

AS also elaborated on the tendu patta issue in the region. Tendu patta or the leaf

of tendu is a plant that grows wild and flowers during the months of May and June. The

leaves are collected, organized into sheaves, and then sold in the local markets organized

specifically for such purpose. These leaves are then sent to “bidi” factories. Bidi is a less

mechanized version of a cigarette. It is smaller than a cigarette, is made of the tendu leaf,

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and is rolled by women and children in often inhospitable conditions. Women are the

ones who collect tendu patta in the forests. Often they are harassed by forest officials for

“encroachment” into forests that are officially designated as protected lands. The idea

may be to protect forests from indiscriminate and excessive use, but this is an idea that

finds a basis neither in the reality of the “use” by the local women nor in its

“excessiveness.” It is part of a government order that transfers to the lowest levels of the

hierarchy in the smallest subdivision of a region or state.

There is no research by local departments or forest officials on what creating such

a protected land means for the people who access it for different reasons, whether for firewood, fruit, or grass. Further, no attempt is made by the government to convey to the people the meaning of any law. The law is made obvious only in its effect and its power, but not in the reasons for its creation. The women do not know what it means to protect land, to put barbed wire around it, and to have a department oversee that it is not encroached upon. They do not know why a land would be protected. They only know that, when it comes to their piece of land, they can neither protect it nor lay claim to their ownership of it as a matter of right or even a legal document. There are more powerful people, who through their social and political status and relationships based on such a status, determine entitlements in a particular context.

However, if law and the social system of organizing entitlements and rewards do not favor the women, the women do not just give up. They survive. They figure out ways to bypass the system and to enter the barbed wire from places that are far from the central office and where the guards would take a longer time to arrive even if they knew that the

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land had been encroached upon. They figured out the times when the department officials are not around to check on them. Women often went as a group. There is safety in numbers. This way, a particularly aggressive guard would not have the chance to be violent. He may threaten them, but he knows that he cannot take on the wrath of a group of women with sticks!

But despite such careful considerations for the sake of survival, the women still risked the possibility of violence against them. There were instances of gang rapes by outlaws in the forests and by the officials. The women risked their lives for an activity that paid so little. Once the women have collected tendu pattas, they create bunches of

100 and each bunch is held together by a sharp, short twig that is inserted like one would insert a safety pin. The price of one 100-piece bunch went up from 12 rupees to 32 rupees in 2002. This was the result of a long, drawn out struggle by the women and the MS.

Initially, the women would bring their material to the tendu patta mandi (whole sale market) where the Phadmunshi (price manager), generally male and of the upper caste, priced their goods. His job was to quickly sift through the sheaves, determine which were “good” and admissible and which were “bad” or slightly rotting. This was always a subjective decision. There was no system of checks and balances against him.

The women could protest the phadmunshi’s final decision, but could not change it. He often got away with cheating the women out of a fair price for their goods. They were forced to take whatever was offered. Once the women left, the phadmunshi would often pick non-usable bunches and put them in the usable basket. This way, he not only paid

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less for the total basket but also made more money on it. MS took up the issue at many levels.

First we approached the forest department that was responsible for appointing the phadmunshi. There were many rounds of discussions, negotiations, and protesting against the department by the women. The sangha women also took up the issue in their own villages. Finally, a low caste woman became the phadmunshi in Chitrakoot, an unprecedented event in the history of the region. The fact that a low caste woman became the phadmunshi was empowering for the women and for the low castes. They now could hope for a fair price.

But soon it became evident that power can be used indiscriminately by those in position to wield it. The issue of equality and fairness then becomes a thing of the past.

This became an opportunity for the low caste men, powerful speakers and leaders in their own community, to direct the activities of the new phadmunshi. The assumption was that women need direction, that they do not have the brains to make decisions. They need to be told what they must do for the sake of their community, who the phadmunshi represented. The argument was that, if the Brahmins and the other higher castes used the position of a phadmunshi to make money, then why shouldn’t the low castes do the same, now that they had an opportunity? The association between holding power and making money through it is an accepted and “natural” one in the minds of those who have traditionally perpetuated the association and, in the process, determined the intersection of caste and class.

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The MS Program and the Coordinators: An Analysis

Through a self-reflective critique of the program at the district level, the coordinators provide clarity on the process of institutionalization at the district level.

They make clear why institutionalization was problematic and women’s agency, including their mandated “freedom” to conceptualize education in ways they deemed fit, was circumscribed by the terms and necessity of the process. They also made clear why the program’s closure in 2001 was connected to the processes that gave shape to the institution in 1991.

These self-reflections, however, also need to be contextualized. The coordinators, who articulated them, are no longer in the same position. They had no formal or continuing relationship with the MS program in 2002, when the ethnography was conducted. In fact, their own political positionings are constructed directly in opposition to and through the critique of the MS program in the new context of 2002. Upon closer examination, however, the critique only serves to reconfigure and legitimize the process

of NGO-ization with the same end (women’s empowerment), a different emphasis (self-

help instead of education), and the same problems of institutionalization as before. More

local agents of development are created, who can successfully mediate between two

languages—the language of self-help and the language of local needs and conditions.

They help transfer developmental agendas to the remotest corners of the rural landscape

to restructure women’s agency therein, with certain problematic results (as showcased in

the example of self-help intervention in the Biyur village in Banda district).

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Even as the agents express frustration with the local women’s inability to create a

vibrant “bachat” (savings) group, they fail to realize their own inability in communicating

the process or even tailoring it to the group’s discomfort with it. This suggestion is contingent on the fact that there is no larger critique within the organization that is posited against the particular institution of self-help. There is, however, enough literature that has questioned the validity of self-help in promoting women’s agency in a holistic

way. Nevertheless, there is enough international funding and support for it as a poverty- reducing framework that fledgling local organizations in Third World cannot ignore or

critique.

Instead they can critique an educational program as outsiders in the new context,

yet through their intimate knowledge of it as insiders. Therefore, they acknowledge nothing about the problematic of self-help. Instead, they give it legitimacy (women’s empowerment only in collectivity and only through economics) through a critique of MS

(elitist, individual-specific education that did not service a social community) and thus

the developmental cycle continues.

The two coordinators identified two levels of institutionalizing a program:

developing its organizational framework and inducting women within it and

collectivizing women in the field around particular women-identified issues such as tendu

patta. But their articulations are more in keeping with showing how a government

mandated program becomes a government program, a process in which the coordinators

are deeply implicated, but, according to them, due to lack of rights’ perspective on the

process. If the fair pricing battle in the tendu patta issue culminated in a low caste woman

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becoming a phadmunshi or the pricing manager, why did this instead re-institutionalize

caste and gender hierarchies in the village? Why did the low caste community now want

to use the position to discriminate against the upper caste vendors in the market as the

latter had done to them? Finally, why was a woman in a position of power, as orchestrated by a program, rendered powerless in face of community level politics? Thus

the question is also: is there a woman’s agency that, instead of being re-directed within

and through institutional processes, is constructed in opposition to it? The coordinators

ask the same question as they construct a critique of the MS program, but never in

relation to their newly emergent institutional agendas for women that have striking

parallels to the institutionalization of MS.

According to the coordinators, there was honesty and hard work in implementing

the program. The strategy was to build village level relationships with women, to

understand their particular condition, and to encourage issue-based collectivization

among them. Ushering in a women’s movement at the local level was a strategy then to

create a collectivity of women and initiate a program through this collectivity. Sanghas

helped institutionalize the MS program first at the village level. It empowered women to

demands their rights and to access and to demand access to spaces as never before, but

within the aegis of the program and in its name. Interestingly, the freedom to implement

the program, and how it could be tailored to the local needs, meant its inevitable formalization as a district level NGO whose principal mandate was empowerment of

women through education.

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Thus, even as they prepared, by traversing through it, an inhospitable social

terrain for the program, the coordinators were working to engraft an institution locally.

Fear and reward marked their particular journeys. These women were principally urban,

post-graduate feminists, whose purpose as outsiders was to become the insiders using the

program as their means to do so. A program that was generated elsewhere found its

organic local home through the commitment of the coordinators, where the essentials of

an urban women’s movement were replicated through such representatives in a local

context, but within the boundaries of their own experiences abroad, nationally, and

locally.

For the coordinators, the problem with MS was exactly what was considered its

strength—government mandate. A mandate may provide the necessary billing for

mobilizing local women for the sake of the program. However, mobilization itself was

meant to create a basic collective of women with the explicit permission of the

social/local patriarchies and therefore not meant to de-stabilize it any way. This collective

was important for identifying community based issues, in gathering more information on

how they might be addressed, and finally in using the aegis of the program in striking a

beneficial deal with the government structures.

The collective was about conscientization of low caste women, about their

transformation into citizens who were better informed about the government and the

process through which its programs may be accessed. This is not to say that the sanghas

did not have the potential to be more than just a collective of women. There were

instances when the power of these collectives was visible, where the women used the

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force of the collective to demand fair wages for their labor during harvesting. But the upper caste outrage at the moment threatened the status of the program and, thereafter, the initiatives of sanghas were to be mediated through the program. Even as the coordinators realized now that the rights perspective was missing from the collectivization strategy and from the training for the sakhis or the formal heads of the sanghas, they were implicated in traversing the fault lines of the institutionalization process.

They also agreed that the program could have become an “andolan” (movement) for the women, but for the “luxuries” that were provided through the program—money for food, travel, and work. Training was provided in exotic locales, far away from the women’s immediate contexts. Even if the idea was that training for women could not be successful in the village where responsibilities of home and children impede such participation, the travel itself (rather than the meeting or agendas) became the purpose.

Dislocating certain women from their local moorings towards their greater politicization for the sake of the community was a good strategy, except that it did not work. The socio- political structure did not suddenly bend in favor of low caste women in the village setting. People did not suddenly share water and agricultural resources, irrespective of caste and gender hierarchies and as a result of the MS.

In spite of MS, women were raped or burned alive for their dowry by their in- laws. The coordinators, therefore, in their critique of the program in current time, show how their leadership in institutionalizing a government mandated and funded program through feminist strategies posed serious dilemmas for them and for feminist agency.

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They launched the idea of andolan for women and reveled in its village level reach and

effect. However, as government program officers, they also launched a simultaneous

campaign to enlist the goodwill and support of district and village level political

structures. This was meant to help sustain the fledgling women’s movement and

women’s collectives at different levels. According to them, they became honest brokers

for a government program. They ensured the successful engrafting of the program in the

local terrain by maintaining the socio-cultural status quo in large measure. Instead of a

program giving a women’s movement its initial push and then allowing it to take its own

direction without fuss or concern for patriarchal reactions, it co-opted its radical

possibilities and instead re-directed them into particular channels.

Literacy and curriculum instruction became the next logical steps for an education

program and using the movement was the necessary condition for instituting these steps.

Once instituted, the programmatic identity became associated with such interventions

rather than the movement at the village level or even the sanghas. Conversely, when

particular issues of heinous violence against women necessitated a spontaneous and immediate collectivization, the institutional segregation of the program and its respective time-bound agendas prevented this possibility. A collective had to be forged in the moment and an argument had to be provided about its absolute necessity (in feminist terms).

Educational interventions gave the program its greatest legitimacy as a non- threatening program. Education of the girls and of women was welcomed because the training carried the potential to service an economic need, rather than engender social

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upheaval. Reading about social movements such as the chipko and anti-alcohol movements within an institutionalized setting of the MSK fired up the women. But the fire remained enclosed and controlled. It did not spread beyond the walls of the school. It did not reach the village level sanghas as information that could ignite a movement along the lines that one read about in books. These remained stories for the women to cherish and tell their children at bedtime.

At exhibitions, women painted their images of such movements on paper, built models to make the experience more real, made maps to show the exact location of the movements in India, and answered questions from guests of honor and the general public.

However, in real life, the battle for a fair wage for firewood and agricultural labor continued, as did domestic violence. Repeated pregnancies weakened the female body and made women helpless in face of familial pressures to produce a son. The intimate relationship between female oppression and socio-political-religious patriarchies could not be dislodged by an alleged radical program. A radical program was rendered regular and governmental because of a dependency relationship that developed between the agents and the program.

Women’s livelihood came to be associated with the program and therefore they could critique nothing that would break such an association. Women were encouraged to question their lived realities, even as they could not bring the program or its maintenance of status quo in social relations within the purview their critique. Instead, the women came under fire for taking the “luxuries” of the program for granted, rather than using the same to build their own andolan.

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The question also is: how can an andolan be built if building women’s collectives

was sidelined in the process of institutionalizing education (e.g., literacy camps, MSK)?

MSK became identified with MS, and sanghas at the village level became the source to

recruit more girls for the school. Andolan or its possibilities were fragmented at the

moment MSK was instituted in Karwi city and as different from the sanghas in villages.

Besides reifying the urban-rural divide in terms of education, the school also reified

caste/class hierarchies between women.

A low caste sakhi’s battles for land rights is sidelined or made invisible in face of another low caste woman’s rise to the top of the educational totem pole of MS. The latter became a star for MS and its token representative. It is therefore not surprising that, even at the district level, the purpose of the program and the notion of women’s agency became lost. Charges of embezzlement within the district office by women in positions of power eventually rendered the program an ordinary government program with bureaucratic problems. This fact alone triggered, first, excessive official control over programmatic interventions such as MSK and, finally, the program’s closure in

Chitrakoot district in 2001.

It is therefore tricky to question the program’s closure when those leading its institutionalization did not bring available experience and knowledge regarding government programs to the process. They did not have the foresight to see that their method of building networks with social political structures of power to engender and then sustain a women’s movement would, in fact, endanger the latter. Further, in developing the mandate of the program to include schools for women, at the cost of

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village level collectives, the program failed to create a local level women’s movement.

Thereafter, the rationale for the program’s closure in Chitrakoot and for total state and

national level government control over its processes elsewhere was that the program had

failed. They took the case of wasting sanghas and overemphasis on MSKs as reason

enough to wrap up the program.

When the coordinators claimed that their agency in leading the program was

fractured because it was a government program, they dispense with their initial

responsibility in preventing its subsequent governmentalization. In the name of the

andolan, at least, the coordinators could have persisted in “saving” the program from its final trajectory. They could have organized, at least a local, if not a regional, colloquium on what they felt was wrong with the program and used the critique constructively.

Instead of declaring that a government program can never be salvaged from its eventual bureaucratization, they needed to seriously reconsider their own interventions into the program.

The coordinators dispensed with their accountability to the program and to the women they recruited for the purpose in their “I told you so” attitude. Even when program documents were allegedly burned in Chitrakoot, the shock of the event was felt, articulated, and condemned by the recruits and not the coordinators. The latter only lamented the death of a program with possibilities that they never persisted in realizing, even for the sake of a local women’s movement.

It is interesting to also note here that the coordinators’ critique of MS is largely a critique of education as a strategy to empower women as a community. But the critique

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also focuses on the program being a government program that rendered the program’s

bureaucratization in latter years inevitable. What the parallel critiques take out of the

equation is institutionalization, a process in which the coordinators are implicated as

much as is the government. It is, in fact, the institutionalization of education within the

program that creates problems for women’s collective agency that is further compounded

by the program’s bureaucratization in 2001.

Such an understanding is missing then in the efforts and agendas of a new NGO

that one of the former coordinators helped establish in Banda. In 2000, the NGO decided

to restructure the village level collectives or the sanghas that the MS had helped create in

the 1990s, but now lay in disuse. It decided on self-help programs as the means to foster the sanghas and women’s collective-based empowerment. This grassroots agenda of a

local NGO reflected a new national and international development focus on self-help in the late 1990s. The NGO’s rejection of literacy and education, even to enhance the self- help experience for illiterate village women, reflected a shifting away of the focus of

macro-development from education as the source for women’s empowerment at the end

of the 1990s. The rejection of education as an empowering strategy was, however, directly related to the MS experience. If the experience of the former coordinators of MS, vis à vis MS, was that education, and not communities, empowered individuals, then the strategy does not work and, therefore, should not be replicated in any form.

The concern about education did not form around their own participation in institutionalizing it and, therefore, individualizing its experience in a rural context.

Instead, the potential of any education to promote women’s collectivity was questioned.

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Therefore, self-help replaced education in fostering sanghas in the agenda of the local

NGO. But in the context of MS, an initial effort was required to assess a need (or lack

thereof) to strategize accordingly the ways in which a need for information can then be

manufactured to address women-specific issues such as clean drinking water in the

village.

In the new context and the new NGO, that effort was not considered necessary.

The self-help strategy was applied to existing sanghas (strong or weak), with the

conviction that it would become easily acceptable to the group. Economic well being,

more often than not, can make believers out of anyone. Unlike MS, where education was sought to be first locally defined and then contoured to grassroots issues in its

applicability towards them, in the new NGO, self-help was already a structured strategy

that was then engrafted onto existing groups. Existing critiques of self-help did not figure

in its selection by the local NGO. Therefore, its implementation also was not reformed by the knowledge regarding its operation and effects elsewhere.

The problems of such an engrafting are evident in the ethnographic material from the village Biyur. The group in Biyur is a group of women who have accounts in the bank and a passbook to prove this. There is great deal of confusion about self-help and the group’s own collective identity vis à vis it. The women do not understand how to transform their savings into self-help incentives for themselves. They have ideas about building a water tank for the village to ensure a regular supply of water for the fields or

even buying a rickshaa for the men so that they can make a living for the family.

However, distrust among themselves prevents dialogue on how exactly to implement

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such ideas. This distrust can be debilitating to the idea of a collectivity. In other villages,

distrust eventually disbanded the group.

Further, the idea of collectively saving money is to enable individuals within the group to borrow money for profitable enterprises or medical emergencies. However, money borrowed has to be returned with interest over time. This way, the collective resources are replenished to be of use to other members for their individual exigencies.

Distrust again prevents members from borrowing money and letting money be borrowed.

They do not expect members to be ethical and return the money as per the rules.

The problem is magnified by the presence of the NGO. Even as the NGO played a critical role in initiating such schemes and training local women for it, they were still determining ways to make themselves useless to the group. The group continuously looked to the NGO representatives to solve the group’s dilemmas and to be the arbiter in their distrust of each other. If the NGO continued to perform the role of an arbiter, even if begrudgingly, it prevented the group from evolving its own leadership and terms of group negotiations.

The NGOs had previously contended that the problem with MSK, specifically was that it produced selfish individuals who failed to become leaders in developing a women’s collective to deal with women’s issues in their respective villages. In other words, an institutionalized education had failed to promote women’s collectivity and an empowerment based on such a collectivity. But by their own admission, self-help also had failed to produce a collective by women for them in Biyur. There were no natural

leaders within the group who could claim to give the group its direction and purpose.

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The dependency relationship with the NGO in matters of decision-making and even keeping accounts of the financial activity within the group further prevented the group from becoming a collective. The NGO institutionalizing self-help took precedence over the problems of such an effect. The nature of the strategy was not derived from the local context, but imposed upon it and through means (sanghas) that had been created through and for a different purpose (MS), which created problems for women’s agency.

Instead of fostering the collective, self-help fragmented it, especially in terms of the distrust that surrounded savings and money. If MS was critiqued for individualizing

women’s agency through institutionalization of education, then the NGO and self-help as

its chosen strategy for promoting collectivization also can be critiqued for subverting

such a process. The NGO only magnified the problem of self-help and women’s agency

in a local context by insisting on its imposition therein.

To summarize, empowerment for low caste women in Banda, according to the

coordinators, was found in their collectivization and building an andolan (movement) through such an identity. Both, however, were problematized by the program in conjunction with other social institutions such as caste, religion, and patriarchy. The coordinators admitted to participating in such a problematization. Their own lack of a rights perspective served to create a dependency relationship between the women and the government, rather than merely using the mandate of the latter to forge a women’s movement.

Even as the focus remained on making women capable and skilled (giving them literacy and curriculum training, making them phadmunshis, and making them vocal and

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articulate), there was not enough emphasis on keeping the women conscious of their rights in the context of their multi-level subordination. The gradual institutionalization of

education also severed education’s erstwhile connection to women’s conscientization.

Education became the end rather than the means to an end, which was women’s

collective empowerment. In other words, if the purpose of getting educated is to find a suitable government job, then a government program for women’s education only served to reify such a perception of a purpose. As education became institutionalized, the

program too became bureaucratized. The woman question was forgotten and each

individual entered into a new struggle for survival. As program functionaries and

recipients demanded accountability from the program, upper level management

discouraged dialogue or critique, even as it faced allegations of embezzlement of

program funds. If institutionalization of education fragmented women’s collective

agency, then the program’s bureaucratization subverted women’s individual agency.

Empowerment then remained an unrealized potential in Banda.

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CHAPTER 6

INSTITUTIONALIZING EDUCATION AND MAKING/WRITING POLICY:

THE BUREAUCRAT, THE THEORETICIAN,

AND THE ACADEMIC-CONSULTANT

The Bureaucrat’s Story: How the Feminists Influenced Him

In Jaipur, I met with the former joint secretary of education in the department of education, government of India. His NGO is called “Doosra Dashak” (the Second

Decade). The NGO works on education for adolescent girls and boys in rural Jaipur and its neighboring areas. I had an hour to spend with him. We sat in his rather airy office at

10:30 on a Monday morning and took him down memory lane. He confessed that he was not sure how he could contribute to an understanding of the MS program. He gave all the women involved the credit for conceptualizing and implementing the program. However, he remained open to an interview whose purpose was to determine his particular contribution to the process, especially the nature of political negotiations in which he engaged to make the program a reality.

He proceeded to suggest a couple of ways in which our interview could be conducted. He said: “Tell me how you want to do this. There are generally two or three ways. The common one is that you ask me questions and I answer, the other is that I reminiscence, ramble on about what went on and why, and the third is that we have a three-way discussion and involve some of my staff in it.” We ended up combining all three methods.

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Sources of Planning: Women’s Development Program

and Mahila Samakhaya

Most of what I know, I learned from people such SJ and AR. Once I have an idea, if anything occurs to me, I ask them a question and then wait for their response. (So how do you know them?) I have known them all my life. Now it is almost 30 to 40 years. My style of working is such that I roll an idea in my mind, then with a small group, and then

finally with a larger group of people. I then experiment with my idea on a very small

scale. I learn from the implementation and then think of ways to expand it, if possible.

So at the end of 1983, I began to think about a development program for rural

women in Rajasthan. WDP was the result. WDP was the government program then

whose agenda was women’s empowerment or women making decisions about their

priorities. It was not a family planning program. The only agenda was that we introduce

in rural communities some activist women, who were trained extensively in gender issues

and who could then convene meetings called the “jaajam.” The jaajam is a spread for

people to sit on and to debate as a collective. We left it up to the women to decide what

they wanted to do in these jaajams. If they wanted to do nothing initially, then it was their

decision. We did not force them to have an agenda.

The kind of training that was organized and given to these women impelled them

to create women’s collectives. Empowerment then was found in women forming their

own collectives for their own issues. This was what WDP was about. MS borrowed from

the WDP experience. But, of course, on both these policies, very able people were

consulted and their input defined the structure of these policies.

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When I say we, I don’t mean me. I don’t think I have done anything by myself. It has always been a collective effort, a whole team involved with the process of

deliberating on policy and also helping to draft it. I may have been the Development

Commissioner at the time in Jaipur and, in a way, can take credit for the advent of the

program, but its theoretical and empirical force was provided by very capable women.

These women were instrumental in getting together and organizing the now famous training sessions that introduced the concept of human touch. This strategy, in which touching each other was seen as crucial to building solidarity between individuals and their emergence as a group, seemed to work with the women. There was a lot of crying, dancing, and holding on to each other physically and mentally. These kinds of training for the program could only be done by women with women.

We also got, for example, AR to do training for us with the prachetas or 10- village level coordinator within the WDP program. The prachetas coordinated the work of village level workers, called the saathin, and AR did some fine training with the prachetas. AR is the wife of a fairly well known man called BR, who heads HWRC at

Tilonia. She gave up her career as a bureaucrat to head the movement for people’s right to information. She also received the Magasaysay award for her efforts. So a lot of smart and accomplished people have been part of WDP and MS.

The WDP experience provided an empirical force for the national policy on education. We were fairly certain about how the national policy on education ought to look. Here, by “we,” I mean Rajiv Gandhi, Narsimha Rao, and a set of very, very important people in the ministry, such as C.P. Sujaya in the Department of Women and

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Child Welfare. She was helping us draft the national policy on education for women. We were all pretty sure that whatever we may or may not say in the national policy, we wanted a paragraph or two about women, about education as an instrument that can alleviate the accumulated distortions of the past in gender relations and correct the problem of women’s subordination.

National Policy on Education (NPE) (1986):

MS as its Program of Action

(At this point, AB stopped and said that he does not like to talk of the past, but when he does, he cannot seem to stop. I let him know that this was my intention.) He continued. It is important to know how the section on “education for women’s equality and empowerment” got inserted into the national policy on education in 1986. The thing is not who drafted it, but the fact that we did it together. We began to talk about other people’s experiences as we discussed this policy. SEWA (Self-Employed Women’s

Association) was at the top of the list. Ela Bhatt, its long-time coordinator, emphasized how powerlessness has historically marked the woman.

To remedy institutionalized oppression, women’s economic ability needed to be continuously forged. We used to find it very difficult to persuade the political leadership even to accept the word “empowerment.” Rajiv Gandhi and Narsimha Rao (former prime ministers) supported it when we put the draft to them. They said that it was not clear to them, “but if you people feel very strongly about it, we’ll let you incorporate

‘empowerment’ in the policy document.” So the term got incorporated into the document.

But what still got asked was—what does it mean? Is it just verbosity? Does it even mean

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anything? The fear was that all policies go the wrong way because not every component

of the policy can be transformed into a program. And when components like the one on women’s empowerment through education do not get transformed into programs, then the policy itself becomes a non-starter. So we decided to illustrate the policy into a program.

Selecting Program Developers

When we started to think about the MS program and to develop a program of action for its implementation, I decided that wouldn’t consult anyone. It was assumed that MS, a component of the education policy on women, should be implemented by the

Department of Women and Child Welfare. They did have a woman bureaucrat who was very able, intelligent, and farsighted. I didn’t have problems with her department implementing the program, except that we had conceptualized the program. So I didn’t

understand why we should transfer the implementational and research component to

them? They could have developed their own program because there are multiple ways to do education for women. I had confidence in my ability to launch the program quickly.

When the education policy was being drafted, I was brought to the Ministry of Education as an additional secretary at the beginning of 1987. As the Secretary in the Department of

Education, I had the power to start the program and I did.

But I will answer you question about why VR and SB were selected as policy developers when there were more capable and fairly well known activists or academics.

(VR had said in her interview that she herself didn’t know why she was called upon to do this job, especially when there were other heavy weights around and that she was seen only as an upstart in the business of policy-making within the government.) The

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bureaucrat’s answer was “illham.” He asked me, “Do you understand ‘illhaam’?” When I

said “no,” he explained. When you suddenly awaken at the moment when the dawn is

breaking into the lingering darkness of the night gone by, then its first light that falls on

you enlightens your mind. This is “illham.” In difficult Hindi, we can call it

“antarprernaa” or inner voice. So it was a matter of “ilhaam” that I chose VR or SB as program developers. It was possible to then get other women for the job who could have done an equally great, if not greater, job, but VR and SB proved to be a great team.

What I did know about them was that these women were absolutely sincere about wanting to do something for the women in the area of education. How do I know that?

Well, I knew this through hearsay. I also know that VR had co-authored a book on gender and poverty in the 1980s. In that book, I had seen an article by VR and then invited her to chat on policy and see whether she was indeed interested in the challenge. I knew after our chat that she would be great, and she proved to be great. I could have taken the help of Jagori (a Delhi based NGO) for the project because I had enlisted their help for other projects before.

But the criterion was simple—the person selected should come aboard immediately and should have a month and a half to commit completely to conceptualizing the program. This is because, once I have set my heart on something, I like it done quickly. You cannot have 100 people working on a program draft. I always thought that the ratio of 2:5 was a good one to settle on. One is too lonely a number and since most ideas occur as a result of two people intensively bouncing ideas off each other,

I decided on two. They worked well together. They also did a great job of consulting

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others, gathering their ideas at various discussion forums, and using their ideas to

concretize the program definition and intent.

Sources of Funding: A Critique and an Alternative

About the funding of the program, I knew some people in the Netherlands

Embassy like the first Secretary of Development in Holland. She happened to visit me

one time and we happened to mention MS to her. We told her that it would not cost too much. We planned to start it in five states on a very small scale. So we asked her if her department or government was interested in providing the money for the program. She said that she would let us know and, within a few days, she said “yes, we can provide the money.”

We could have gone to some other agency and could have gotten the money because, if you are the Secretary of Education, you have considerable influence with funding agencies. The others, besides the Netherlands, who might have been interested in the project, were Sweden, UNICEF (which provided money for the WDP program in

Rajasthan), and NORETT (a Norwegian agency). I couldn’t care less about the political ideologies that determined the positive response from the Dutch. I don’t care what the new trend was in Dutch politics vis à vis women’s development. I was convinced that if an external funding agency pledged money to the project, then the probability of its going through the finance ministry would improve considerably. So I was interested in getting some money for the project as quickly as possible.

However, I don’t like USAID. So I didn’t approach them or the World Bank. All these funders insist that someone from their agency be part of the project (to evaluate or

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to oversee it). I don’t like that. (Here I asked AB why he was so against the World Bank

and USAID. He said: “There is whole book that I have co-authored, called the ‘World

Bank and the Financing of Education,’ that answers your question. That is a different

subject and I don’t want to go into that right now.” Yet he did and provided insight into

his critique of American funding agendas). Generally, organizations in which Americans

have preponderance like to impose their ideas and do not respect indigenous talent or capability. They think that only they can build peoples’ capacity, and I think we in India are perfectly capable of building our own capacity. World Bank is a different matter. It runs the organization in a rapacious manner, provides money badly, and has complicated funding procedures.

Identifying Areas for MS

So we then got the money from the Dutch and started the program in the 10 districts that we had already identified for the purpose. VR administered the program in the beginning. We had set up the national resource group, of which I was the chairperson.

I then invited Ila Behn to be the chairperson instead of me and, in turn I became a member of the group. I was an active member. I was part of the 42 consultations on the first draft of the MS. I didn’t expect VR to report to me on all the aspects of the meetings.

But I kept up to date on all the discussions. I was very much part of the widespread consultations with the state governments regarding the program and in identifying the districts where the program could be implemented. We wanted the program to function as an independent society. We wanted local NGOs to particularly have a say in the selection

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of program functionaries. We visited the earmarked states and each was willing to accept all our expectations of them with regard to the program.

I now don’t recall why I earmarked three states and 10 districts per state to implement the program in. I remember faintly that the factors we looked into included:

(a) the probability of the success of the project in the districts identified, (b) backwardness of the districts in which the program was to be implemented, and (c) the willingness of the local administration to agree to a partnership of a kind with local

NGOs to implement the program. The last one was an important consideration. Based on these three factors, we were able to attribute to choose three states—Andhra, Karnataka, and Uttar-Pradesh. Bihar was a good candidate too because it is really a backward region of the country, but there, the Bihar education project was already on. In Rajasthan, we had already launched Lok Jumbish. In Orissa, there was the UNDP project that looked at primary education.

In all these programs, there was a strong component of women’s equality. MS was not to be the only program for the education for women. This was not our intention. I took a lot of interest initially in sitting down with the state level secretaries and selecting the program directors for the MS state office. I wanted the program to be supported administratively. I didn’t want any negativity to figure into the program’s implementation. One negative person can kill the program. I wanted to make sure that the local administration understood the program well and knew what not to do to make it successful. My involvement with the program was as basic as this. After that I pretty

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much took the back seat and let the program unfold. Its unfolding was very much in tune with what we had expected and envisioned. Nothing could be greater than that.

SJ: The Academic and Theoretician (Jaipur)

Introduction

After my interview with AB, I headed to the interior of the city. I had another hour to kill before meeting with SJ, the coordinator of Sandhan, an educational resource agency in Jaipur. AB always credits SJ for providing the theoretical vigor to the MS program document and he had asked, even before I sat down to the interview with him,

“have you met SJ yet?” When I said “yes, I would be meeting with her at 2.00 this afternoon,” he nodded his head vigorously in appreciation and then added: “SJ will not only give you a lot of information, but also profound insights into the program, that is one of SJ’s strengths. Most of what I have done, I learned from people such as her.”

I was both intrigued and excited about what SJ would have to say about the making of MS and in what ways she would articulate her experience regarding the MS program that would be different or similar to that of the bureaucrats or the program developers. But this was not the first time that I was meeting with her. I had a similar opportunity to meet with her in 1995. She had come to Delhi for a seminar on literacy that was organized by the NGO with which I formerly worked. They all had met at the

Institute of Development Studies (IDS) in Jaipur in the early 1980s. Then I was too much in awe of activist-intellectuals that I couldn’t say anything beyond introducing myself.

But now there was not only a perspective, but also a reason to engage with her. I arrived at this house that functioned as an office for Sandhan. The floor of the room was set in

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jaajam style. Jute mats lined the floor and red printed floor cushions rested against the

sides of the walls. We sat in this room and began the interview.

Breaking a Myth: Policy as Independent of the Social

At the outset, SJ said that her responses would be “part in Hindi and part in

English because that is how my thought process works.” She continued. Firstly, I would

like to break this chronological myth that first there is a policy and then its

operationalization. This is the way a program is seen by the people on the outside. But

actually the policy was the distillation of the core patterns that emerged through

experiences which were much prior to the policy. Even the national policy on education

(1986), the section on women’s equality, was actually derived out of the experience of hundreds of actors across the country, particularly women’s groups and what they wanted

to achieve. Finally, we found that women’s equality is a major dimension of social

change.

The whole issue begins with a deep consciousness of asymmetry in society and

the marginalization of virtually half of the society by virtue of its gender. Any such thing

has a logic that is totally incomprehensible to the current groups. MS, therefore, emerged

as a culmination of sifting out patterns that had already been part of the experience. So it

was not that you had a policy and then you thought of strategies of operationalization.

There was an operational reality, but in NGOs and in small pockets. But to go out on a

larger scale requires a kind of structure, a kind of commitment, a kind of space that

requires a state mandate. So what AB (the bureaucrat) did was to take the cherished

values of women’s groups and their experiences, weave them into the language of policy,

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and give them a government mandate so that the state governments could also pledge

their commitment. This is what he did. This was in 1986. But the experiences that went

into it existed much before this and, of this the biggest experience was the Women’s

Development Program (WDP).

Education as “Greatest Good for the Greatest Number”

My association with the National Policy on Education (NPE) began when I was

teaching in a college in Jaipur. AB was Development Commissioner in Rajasthan then,

and I was asking how come our education system is so distanced from what is

meaningful and what makes sense in life? How come education goes totally parallel to

what happens in life and life never gets informed by it? This was my greatest concern

about education.

From 1976 onwards, I have been thinking along these lines. I was saying that the

educational system is continuously promoting the personal good of the people, but the

personal good never matches the collective good. If you have a good education, then you

will make a good career for yourself but that you will use it for the sake of others is never

ensured. There is a dichotomization between personal success and public good. We often complain that an educated person is very self-centered and does not do anything for the country. We want everybody to be educated, but the output was a person who is enormously self-centered. This was the broad lament of the people.

I was asking why you are lamenting now. The whole process of education is tied to getting better grades. It is not required of an educated person to do anything for another. You never got grades for being kind to your neighbors. But if we wanted that

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kind of an output, then why was this not reinforced? I was basically showing my discontent with the framework within which education was placed. When the education policy was being formulated, we were identifying the gaps that are in the existing system, of which women’s equality was a major gap. But women’s equality as a concept got validation because we had already worked in WDP.

I was, at that time, at the Institute of Development Studies (IDS). I was setting up a women’s studies center there. This program was again conceptualized as experimental, with no targets, and was largely exploratory. We wanted to see whether there could be a program that would be for the empowerment of women and not really for economic activity. This was the first program in the country that was a government program that had no targets, only empowerment as its end. Now what that empowerment could mean, nobody knew. It had to be explored. The term empowerment came in WDP itself. Then it became a bigger term in the NPE, in which women’s equality and empowerment were inserted as essential to the success of the policy.

WDP and MS: A Collective/Feminist Conceptualization

But to come back to your earlier question about how WDP came about, WDP again was drafted by AB, but he took support from AR, who was then at SWRC, Tilonia, doing leadership training for women. It was also an opportune consideration because women’s development was in the government’s 21-point program. However, nobody knew what development for women should mean. The point was that it was not women’s development that the state was interested in, but it needed women for development.

Without women their development promise sounded hollow. The government needed

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women to buffer its statistics on development. WDP was a process-oriented program. The

idea was that women form a collective and elect a leader through consensus. This leader was then trained to forge the strength of a collective without becoming dictatorial. The leader should not demand obedience to her ideas. Instead, she should ask for everyone’s input in any scheme or intervention.

(At this point I asked SJ who helped AB draft the program. He refused to use the term “I” in the drafting of either MS or WDP; it was the “we” at work and, conceptually, ideas were coming from all sides. Were you also part of the “we” in conceptualizing the program?) I was there among many others. The important thing was that we all were different, with different sets of training. AR was an activist. I was trained in academia.

AB was a bureaucrat. So we were pooling three different kinds of experiences to churn out a policy.

We knew that, unless there were alliances of some kind, we could not think of major shifts in society. Social change requires many points of intervention and, especially, a government mandate to make things move and happen. We were also trying to interpret development, solidarity, and notions of collective awareness. We were trying to ascertain the meaning of empowerment. For example, in a subordinate position, women have had to suffer the consequences of decisions made by those who have been insensitive to them. From a state of powerlessness that manifests itself in the feeling of “I cannot,” empowerment becomes “we can.” From “I” we get to “we,” from helplessness to “we can.”

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(Here I inserted an additional question: Does collectivization work? Does it

specifically work in areas where there is scarcity of education and especially with rural

women? How does this alternativeness in education then translate into mainstream

education?) You are here asking two questions. Collectivization happens when you have an identified a struggle. It is the struggle that gives you a feeling of being a group. Unless there is a struggle, a group is an aggregate of women. You must have a common cause and that common cause gives you a sense of the “we.” This pronoun gets its meaning from togetherness. Mainstream education is important not to the women, but to their daughters because our education system is so sterile that it cannot allow for offshoots.

But we also have to ask the question, what is the mainstream anyway? Actually, the mainstream is the side stream. The mainstream is the poor, who exist outside of education. They are the mainstream by their sheer numbers and by virtue of their marginalization.

Education as “Greatest Good for an Individual”: A Contradiction

(I asked yet another question: Even in Delhi, they were trying to measure the changes in the lives of girls and women in MSK. Lot of impressionistic things came up— that once women went through this intensive curriculum training, they began to remove themselves from the collective. They began to see education as a personal thing. Why do you think this disjunction happened?) This is because their struggles ended. My contention is that the collective exists only when you have a common struggle.

Otherwise, what you eat, I don’t really taste, and it doesn’t inform my body. So knowledge is also something that is personal. In the final analysis, you knowing

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something does not benefit me. Unless we are working from a common cause, then

education does not come in handy. The moral of the story therefore is that women’s

struggle should be constantly diversified.

(But you seriously think their struggle ended? Because it was not as if they

suddenly got more wages than before.) Well, some did. If their struggle was for better

wages than any of their teachers or the coordinators, then it was a failed struggle because

the differences are so stark. I don’t think that was their ambition. They were better than

others within their own zone, not those who were above them. Their struggle ought to have been different.

One of the sahyoginis I knew in Banda started her work with Bhaiji’s

organization. There she lived and worked in complete fear. She used to be so affected by that space. She always remained tentative about her own abilities. After becoming a

sahyogini in MS, some of her hidden potential was realized. She became more articulate.

She wanted to learn English. Then she wanted to learn the computer. But it was mostly an

individual struggle and later became a personal journey, rather than a collective one. She

didn’t say that until her sisters moved on, she wouldn’t also. But I would say that it is sad

that all the groups who were working for women had very specific, individual-based

agendas. Collectivizing was no longer a goal.

(But do you still see education as an empowering process? What should be the

content of education for it to be empowering for women?) I think that education should

basically enhance your capacity to identify and access knowledge. This is point one.

Two, you should have the capacity to assimilate it. Three, you should have the capacity to

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apply it. Four, you should be able to contribute to it. Empowerment is a three-stage phenomenon. First, you should be able to discern the centers of power—economic power, political power, knowledge power, or whatever power. But you should know who wields power and why. Second, you should be able to distinguish between just and unjust power.

Third, you should have the guts to reach out to achieve lateral support and resist an unjust use of power.

NPE: A Contested History

(How do you locate the NPE, in terms of any of the policies that came before it or after? The reason I am asking that question is that I would like to know how a policy such as this comes about. Because of a certain group of people like Rajiv Gandhi or AB or the people he knew at the ground level, who could distill the experiences of women’s movements into policy?) No, it was never an individual effort. But NPE has been subjected to a very severe critique. The patent theme for some was that it was wrong policy. They argued that the policy suffered from its colonial pasts and was elitist. The whole formulation of the policy one could compare to the symbol of the train with 15 compartments that are all empty. What kind of people get into it, who takes the journey, who gets the benefits of that journey is based on people’s competence, action, and ability.

One could interpret NPE and build an MS. Alternatively, one could critique the program and make that one’s life’s agenda. But we were not interested in what was wrong, but rather interested in finding out where the space is to do the things we wanted to do. We should have a concrete agenda, a vision, and the will to implement such a vision.

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(Do you think the NPE and the MS and all its manifestations like the lok jumbish,

WDP, Bihar education project, would have been possible without AB and the position he was in to initiate something like these?) What about AB? What are we trying to say here?

Here is the bureaucrat who has a certain position. There are lots of people in positions of power, but who don’t know how to use it. First, he used that power well. Second, he had the humility to know what he doesn’t know. So he respected people who knew. Third, his biggest asset is his ability to identify talent. He respects, values, and promotes people who can do it. That is what he did with WDP and later with MS. He made it possible for a kind of experimentation to happen in the government.

Actually, the state departments are not designed for experimentation or innovation. They are only designed for maintenance. I don’t think that should change. I don’t think you should have experimentation in the government. There should, however, be humility in government to allow experimentation to happen. I don’t like too much government control in anything. You should have spaces for people to do their own thing, have their own way. If people are strong enough, they will struggle to create spaces for themselves. People’s strength is possible only if there are already spaces in the government for people’s strength to emerge. (But the government can pre-empt, co-opt, or even crush people’s struggles and change their strategy.) Oh! They do it all the time. I have never ever worked in the government before. Just cannot. It is impossible.

The Self as the Source of Policy

Actually, I came back to the profession after 17 years of being a housewife. I was a teacher before I got married and then, for 17 years, did not do anything of that kind. I

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was raising children and doing the normal functions of a woman’s reproductive years—

looking after the house, children, and husband. I came back to teaching when my children

were grown, but I found teaching very futile and started asking if things could be

different. I was lucky that I met all the people that I did. (Why did you feel that there was

no meaning?) It was all rote learning in college. It was about memorizing what Milton

said or what some firang (white person) said. How does all this make a difference to

understanding the economic dimension or social dimension of this country?

(What was your critique of your own life that you brought to the discomfort you

have with the educational system?) I vacillated between many hemispheres before

coming back to teaching. I began a very normal life, a very middle class or rather upper-

middle class life. You get married to someone who is in an oil company and belongs to

Bombay’s high society. Then many things happen that sharpen your questioning about

life in general. Maybe even my genetic code is such that I question everything.

Policy as a Discursive Process

(I know that the MS document was circulated for public comments. Who was this

public comprised of?) The public was very large. The initial document was circulated

widely—in colleges, universities, media, everywhere. In each state, there were seminars conducted at every level. I had the privilege of participating in many such forums.

Actually people used to laugh at the policy. Some of the educators at such meetings were very skeptical, saying that it was all a “natak” (play-making) because the government will do what it will.

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Rajiv Gandhi was made a laughing stock. I remember going to a seminar that was attended also by a prominent Delhi-based educator. When we met, he exclaimed: “Oh, you too are participating in this. How come?” He was probably wondering why I was involved in such a wasteful effort. So I replied, “well, you too.” We went in, but after the first 15 minutes, he sent me a note. The note said that he would better utilize his time at a music performance outside than in such a seminar. I protested. “We have barely begun.”

He said: “The important thing was to pick up a bag with all the program summaries, materials. I am picking my bag and I am going.” It was a joke, of course, but also a criticism par excellence of the process.

But my contention is that there can be multiple ways in which a program can be understood. But every perspective had a common denominator. They all saw marginalization of women as a reality, but also held the belief that women have an equal right to education. Now this is my entry point. For Ela Bhatt, economics was the entry point. This was also because her movement was essentially a trade movement. AR began with issues of wages and mazdoori. Minimum and fair wages became her common denominator to mobilize women. In WDP, violence against women was the issue to mobilize women against. But the collective is always critical about empowering women.

This is a fairly Marxist argument—join hands and bring in your collective bargaining power. That was what was happening in WDP but maybe did not quite happen in MS. (At this point SJ pleaded lack of time and we had to stop our interview).

VR: The Academic (Program Developer)

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On April 2, 2002, I met with VR, one of the two program developers. She lives in

Patparganj, an upcoming suburbia in West Delhi, an area that I had heard of, but had no idea about how to get to, without being hopelessly lost, or worse, late for the meeting. I had learned about her from people at the local NGO where I previously worked. She often came to the NGO for workshops or just to give her expert advice on the program’s evolution in Banda and the NGO’s own curriculum development efforts for women there.

But I was a diffident employee and also as a new entrant in the NGO world, unsure of how to interact with its bigwigs and their world of knowledge about people. So I was still going to be stranger to her, especially a stranger that was also a student in an American university. I chose not to tell her about my professional past.

When I called her, she was hesitant, saying: “So much has been written and said about MS now; it is an old topic. Why are you still interested?” I could only say, “well, everyone may have a different perspective on it.” That may not have been the most satisfactory answer, but she granted me the interview nevertheless. Interestingly, when I reached her place that fateful day, she greeted me like she knew me! My fears were eased further when she mentioned a close friend of hers was also the coordinator at the NGO where I had worked. She had put in a good word for me. This made the interview easier for VR because then she wouldn’t have to go into the nitty gritty of the program with me.

I think she was also relieved that she wouldn’t have to talk about every possible detail of the program. Her exhaustion, vis à vis the program stemmed from years of talking, writing, presenting, and analyzing the issues related to the program. She was both appreciative of the fact that program gave her an opportunity to review 50 years of

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women’s movements and issues therein, in a way that made the program reflective of

such changes with a clear vision of the future for what future policy changes could be

engendered. At the same time, she was unable to disconnect herself from the program as

its principal author. All said and done, we knew that the interview would provide for

interesting revelations, nevertheless.

The Invitation

I inserted a few questions here and there. but generally VR was able to talk about

the program in sufficient detail by herself. She started from the very beginning. AB, the

Education Secretary in the Department of Human Resources, government of India, called

me to his office in July or August 1987 (I don’t remember very well) and said: “Here is

this nice policy (the national education policy of 1986). Is there some way it can be translated into a project?” I said that I didn’t know and he asked whether I was willing to

give it a try. I said “yes, but I will not be able to do this alone” and he said, “no I have

another person in mind.” SB was associated with SPARC, an NGO for pavement

dwellers in Bombay and was a visiting professor with Tata Institute of Social Sciences

(TISS).

The Task: Drafting Policy, Researching Possibilities

We embarked on a strange journey together. We were given a consultancy contract for 40 days for which the government would not pay. I remember that AB called the Dutch embassy and said: “Are you people interested in funding girls’ education?

Would you like to fund a team to go around the country and explore whether such an idea

is at all possible?” The Dutch embassy funded our contract and we started our research in

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Rajasthan, the site of WDP (Women’s Development Program). The WDP structure was

such that the Precheta (supervisor) was responsible for the 10 villages and there was a village level worker for each village, called the saathin. We had long meetings with prachetas, saathins, and project directors and asked them—if you were given an opportunity to redesign WDP, what would you do differently than before? What are the good and the bad points of the program?

We got the same response—that the idea was a radical one, but if you have to empower people, you need to develop their consciousness so that they can demand education or anything else as an entitlement, rather than as a dole. WDP was not designed like that. It was more loosely designed and concentrated more on having one woman activist in each village, rather than building one collective per village. This kept the workers isolated. One exciting thing was that the women themselves said that, once the women are convinced of the importance of literacy in their own empowerment journey, they will seek it out and, at that time, the program should be able to provide it, which the

WDP was not designed to provide; it did not have the mandate to provide it.

Traveling to Rajasthan

We actually spent a considerable time in Rajasthan, traveling and talking to people. We became pretty much clear in our minds (more SB than I) that this kind of collective mobilization works. This gives people a platform on which to come and explore their own lives. SPARC philosophy and aim were quite organically linked to

WDP and we were very clear, in the first 10 days, where we would like to start and how we wanted to start. We came back to Delhi and bounced off the idea with two to three

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other people, who I feel were critical in helping us decide on the language of the program. As an IAS office, the woman had tremendous experience in the field of women and development.

When SB heard us talk about WDP and SPARC, she was very excited, but asked us to do an assessment of what went wrong with DWCRA. What were the design problems with DWCRA? At this point, a natural division of labor emerged between SB and me. I evaluated DWCRA and SB did a lot of concept writing. The detailed assessment of DWCRA showed us that it was a program that was premised on the idea of a women’s collective. Certain loans were to be given to women for economic activities.

Many empowerment components should have gone into it when it was conceived in 1970s, but that never happened. While the concept was interesting, it never got communicated down the line. The one who formulated it set the government guidelines— so many groups will be formed, so much seed money will be provided. But what never got analyzed or understood beyond the program document was why so many women?

Why a collective for women was important as a starting point never got articulated or communicated to the last person in line in the implementation process.

Previous Women’s Programs: Problems and Possibilities for MS

What made MS stand out was just this—that a year was spent in training or participatory training of workers in which they discussed, debated, and internalized the concepts central to the MS program. If I am communicating something to you and you add to it, then you will have the same sense of ownership of the program as I do. One human being cannot come up with anything perfect. There is always the need to add, and

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there was enough openness in the document to allow for such discussion to take place.

For example, MK (former coordinator for MS Banda) could add her bit to the program

and therefore feel a part of the program. Therefore it became important for us to create a

program that provided the scope for this kind of dialogue and growth.

The biggest problem with DWCRA was that the concept paper was beautiful, but when you went to the field, it was just a set of government orders cast in stone with their

own set of rules and regulations. So what we said was that India has come up with

beautiful ideas along the line, but the need is to move from conceptualization to

operationalization. That movement has to be done sensitively so that everyone feels that

they have a sense, or are a part of, creating it. Like DWCRA, there were problems with

ICDS. The latter also was not a badly conceived program. It also talked about women’s

collectives—that local women participate in the program, take care of nutrition and also

organizing its dispensation. The anganwadi worker was its only facilitator in terms of its

literacy components.

The local women’s group was responsible for the functioning of ICDS, but the

idea never worked. Basically, the government stipulation was that there would be this

worker and so much food would be given to her for dispensation. The concept of a

collective and group around it got lost. In fact, when I started to talk to people about rural

development, even joint forest management programs, the problem of implementation

seemed to be the problem. The government conceptualizes such programs with the help

of people who are community oriented, but when it comes to operationalization, it gets cast in stone.

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So the original MS document was just a starting point. We knew that, unless the document was negotiated and discussed with people at all levels, unless there was transfer of ownership, the program would not take off. I feel uncomfortable saying that

“we” owned MS. We were just the catalysts that started the process or put the process in motion. Maybe SB had a different perspective on it. I don’t know. Definitely, AB and I felt that we had provided a broader framework, a concept that women could easily understand and absorb. We were able to transfer a sense of ownership to people. That is the only reason why, when you meet people in Karnataka, Gujarat, U.P., they all feel that

MS is very much their program.

Drafting a Policy: The Process

Broadly, the conceptual history of the program goes somewhat like this. The first document was written in September 1987. A big consultation was organized, to which women from different NGOs in Delhi were invited. With a few exceptions, there was general support for the program. There were individuals who were extremely vociferous at the meeting and said that something like this would never work. But there were others who said that this is all a new idea, but why not give it a try? Why should we always doubt everything else besides our own work or affiliations?

Ela Bhatt of SEWA, in her characteristic style, said that empowerment cannot be separated from economics at any point and in any discussion around the question of rural women’s empowerment. She has always maintained this, but at this time, she was willing to give the program a try. We don’t want to be always groping in the dark about what we should do about women’s education. So we should not let this opportunity go.

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I used to be a teacher in Delhi University. AB asked me in December 1987 whether I could come on deputation to the Ministry of Education for a year, just to get the program off the ground. I joined on March 1, 1988 as a consultant for MS. In April 1989, the program was officially launched. This one year was an exciting journey for me. It was also a very important one. Four things are critical to understanding this journey. I organized the original draft document and organized a total of 42 consultations in

Karnataka, U.P. and Gujarat, with NGOs and other activists. I did not identify the districts for the program. I joined in March and, by April, the central government, in consultations with different state governments, was able to identify the recipient districts.

Once the districts were identified, we went to each district and held discussions there. In the 42 consultations MS’s feasibility as a program was discussed in detail. In the

Benares meeting, held in the district of Sewapuri, one local NGO was willing to try the concept out if Jagori could come on board to do the training. There was some money in

NPE to try out some innovations in education. But there was no money for MS then.

Some money was given to NGO to innovate in terms of education on an experimental basis in Benares. In Banda, the program was implemented by Bhaiji’s ABSSS. In Tehri, another NGO, called the Lok Jivan Vikas Bharti, started the program with the help of other NGOs in the region.

Implementing a Policy: Initial Problems

But even before the formal inauguration of the program, if any NGO was willing to start MS on an experimental basis in 10 villages, we organized training and selected functionaries there. We said that you can start the program, but the overall conceptual

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training will be provided by us. Training in U.P. was done by Jagori. In Karnataka, we

started with NGOs as well, but not in Gujarat, where the government would not allow us

to do anything. Gujarat was also where we waited until the program formally began in

1989.

In Banda, I plodded along and was helped by close friends and colleagues. There was no budget. I was the only paid worker. In all the consultations and meetings, I would

take detailed minutes and then organize them later for the purpose of circulating them for

discussion purposes. There were 10 drafts before the green book evolved. For every new

draft I wrote, I made 40 to 50 copies and circulated them. Lots of people got to see it and

comment on it. Then we had to write a formal project document and that formal

document I pretty much wrote myself. But I don’t think all the ideas were mine. The

ideas came from meetings. The ideas around the organizational structure of the MS

program at the district level—whether there should be a district implementation unit

(DIU), how many people should be its members—came up at the meetings. All these

ideas evolved over the years, although I took notes at every meeting and systematically

put them together (these were also the notes that I couldn’t get to see because they were

in storage at VR’s in-laws’ house in Jaipur. She promised to bring them on one of her

trips there if I could promise to catalogue them for the Delhi NGO’s library. But

somehow this never happened).

Budgetary Innovations: Accommodating New Ideas

By December 1988, we had the “green book” (the final MS document) ready, and

we had these NGO projects throughout the country that had already started. We also had

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to do the finance expenditure memo, which is also a standard government procedure because the approval of the cabinet is necessary for a program to get off the ground. So in

March and April, we were busy with that. But my biggest challenge was, and where I feel that I made an important contribution, was developing an open-ended budget. Most government programs have a straitjacket budget system. The MS program doesn’t have that straitjacket approach. It was an evolving budget.

How to create a budget that takes into consideration an open-ended program was a challenge because most government programs are not open-ended. Normally, what government does is that it says that it will go to so many villages, multiplies the total cost of the materials required therein, and that becomes the budget. They provide the seed money at the central level and then let the state governments decide how many villages they want to expand it to, in how many villages they want the mahila kuteer (huts for women), adult education centers, and what kinds of training they want.

We told the states to decide on the range of their expenditures. We never set the targets for them. We did say that you set 100 kuteers, 100 NFC centers, 100 this and 100 that. Instead we allocated percentages—20% for adult education in the first year of the program and 30% for kuteers in the next year. But there was no pressure on you as the project designer to use that money. You may not have needed the whole amount, but then you could revise your estimates accordingly. Money was released on the basis of your yearly planning, but if your expenditures overshot your planned budget, it didn’t matter.

The money could be released as and when the need arose. This is aspect of MS has remained the same.

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What happens in government programs is that the financial people end up dictating the program. Our concern was how to create a program where the financial aspect was sensitive to the needs of the field, rather than dictating the needs of the field.

The money from the Dutch was more than enough. The open-ended nature of the budget had nothing really to do with amount of money available. It all had to do with the rules and procedures. The breakthrough MS budget is now being used in other programs such as the District Primary Education Program (DPEP), sponsored by the World Bank. The budget accommodates the fact that in the beginning we didn’t know how many “mahila samuhs” (women’s groups) would come up or how many centers would get formed. So as a district coordinator, you had the freedom to decide your own local needs. This is important because then the program moves at the pace set at the local level, rather than at the national level.

What is in a Name?

The other interesting part is the name of the program. There used to be an organization in Andhra-Pradesh called samakhaya, but it is now called the Cooperative

Development Federation. I am from Andhra and there, any federation, women’s groups, or savings groups are always called samakhaya. Like any Sanskrit word, it can have several meanings. If we split the word, then “sama” means same or equal and “aakhyaa” means a gathering. The term therefore has come to mean a gathering of equals for the purpose of dialogue. In other words, the term means dialoguing as equals. The notion of

MS as a society also was not new. The first ever society that was formed was the Shiksha

Karmi Board in Rajasthan. The MS society therefore had a flexible NGO-like structure,

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but enjoyed the authority of a government program. Now every government program is made into a society. In fact, all foreign funded programs are managed through a society named after the program or the intervention. I worked on registering and formalizing these societies.

Educating Women: Some Feminist Dilemmas and Field Level Revelations

I have never been a trainer, but no one was willing to take on Banda. Jagori was not interested. They were interested only in Tehri and Benaras. Even Saharanpur had the support of Delhi-based NGOs for training and related activities. But Banda, no one wanted. So I just went ahead and did what I needed to do. I had observed many training sessions in Gujarat and Karnataka with Jagori. So I did my own research there, located potential local NGOs that might be interested in the program, and set up a selection process for grassroots functionaries of the program. But when a Delhi NGO came along later in the 1995, I practically handed Banda to them. I did not also want Jagori to take more than two districts because Jagori understood the program in their own particular way, and this is what determined their interventions and training in the field.

All of us are feminists, but there also are differences. Jagori had one perspective, but there were many others too. Domestic violence is a critical issue and it was possible to talk about education as a way to redress such an issue. But I think that women’s marginalized status as workers needed to be considered too. Jagori always started their training sessions by taking the women on their own personal journeys. I don’t believe in this approach. I believe there should be different approaches to the articulation and

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understanding of gender. But I didn’t deny Jagori what they did. I respected their work and their perspective.

So here’s another interesting experience. I had just landed in Banda and I didn’t quite know what to do. I tried to take new approach (it is documented in my paper The

Making of Mahila Samakhaya: A Personal Journey, 1995). Basically, what I did was ask the women that if they had ten wishes to ask God, what would these be? (the insertion of

“God” was strategic because I was dealing with devoutly religious women). I wanted a consensus among the women on such a list of wishes. I was not interested in a list of 40. I was only interested in 10 wishes that could be collectively negotiated and written.

Consensus to me was important and this small activity would tell me how the women would respond to the program in the future.

So we spent two hours writing our lists. We put them on chart boards. Then they broke up into smaller groups of five to arrive at their consensual list. Later the women were asked to create another such list for the whole group. This whole exercise took two days. The list that was eventually produced was an interesting list, especially in terms of what was prioritized. The women wanted to live their life in dignity, be provided with two meals a day, clean drinking water and clean air, a roof over their heads, justice, self- sufficiency, and wanted water to come to their village, their children to have a childhood, not an education (children in the village grow up very fast even before they have reached the age of seven years), equality between men and women, good health, government to be within their reach and responsive to their needs and, finally, freedom from domestic violence.

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What was interesting about this priority list was the fact that it took less than an hour to compile and at the top of the list was the need to live in dignity. Maybe Banda went a different way because we started a very open-ended program there. By “we,” I do not mean me. There was Bhaiji and AS, who were there to help me with this process. VR helped in terms of negotiating the local language and getting women together for this training. She did a lot of translations on both sides and much face-to-face dialoguing with the women.

But even Bhaiji was quite a character. In those days, at least, he was (or appeared to be) pro-poor. He had worked in Banda on the Tendu leaf campaign. But Bhaiji was to be a temporary arrangement. MS’s own identity and structure had to be made autonomous. Tensions with him started when he realized that we seriously meant that our alliance with him was temporary. When the district office was set up, the sahyoginis were most happy. Many of them did not like him as a person. We had to sideline him quickly also because he also played host to Kar Sevaks in 1992, when they returned home after demolishing the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya.

Gender, Caste, Religion: Trying to Identify a “True” Subaltern at Such a Crossroads

We were also very sure that we wanted the program to be owned by the women, especially the low caste women in the region. We were very clear that the women who would be recipients of the program were those most deprived of social resources, especially education. We did not want to define them in terms of caste, class, or religion.

So our easy way out was that we would work with those families first who had historically been denied access to education.

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Gujarat, however, did not follow this intent. The first batch of sahyoginis was from the Patel or the higher caste. There was nothing in the program that specifically excluded the Muslim women. But there have been very few Muslim women who have worked in the program since 1989. But this might be very specific to Banda. I am not sure what happened. There are Muslim bastis and communities there. Maybe they were never really approached. The term low caste women may have been taken literally to mean Hindu low caste and not extended into other categories. But such was not the case in Bijapur or Bidar. The program was extended to low caste Hindus, Muslims, and

Lambadias.6

The other issue has been the emergence of micro-credit on the development scene. The literature on “economic empowerment will lead to overall empowerment” is

quite well developed. We were constantly reminded of it by people in the movement.

They kept telling us not to ignore that. We said that we didn’t want to ignore it. But we were launching this program through the education department. We, in the education department, felt that we needed to redefine education to make it an empowering experience. We wanted to use the opportunity of a government department launching an education program to push through women’s empowerment program schemes. Also being in the education department, we did not have the resources to launch credit programs. Interestingly, everyone’s getting into credit now, especially in the MS. They

6 This was interesting to me as a researcher and forced me ask why the possible marginalization of particular communities, while including one that has been historically marginalized was not considered? Communal divide is not new and not limited to U.P. Why wasn’t an effort made to consider and ensure that when the idea was to reach women who have been historically underprivileged, why did the program exclude Muslim women? Why wasn’t this discussed in the program prior to its implementation or even

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are getting money from everywhere, even the government, to strengthen the women’s

credit co-operatives. The sanghas or village level women’s collectives that had a different

purpose under MS are now the principal saving groups in many districts. So a program

that had eschewed micro-credit in favor of education, even if experimentally, came full

circle in the economic paradigm.

Policy on Education and Its Makers: An Analysis

The process of institutionalization is as much about discourse creation as it is

about strategies and modes of its implementation at the grassroots. This section presents

the program/policy as a moment of collaboration between the state and women’s

movements (between their representatives and between ideologies born of and

determining operational realities). In the articulations of both sides, one can see how and

in which specific moments the state co-opts the ideas of the women’s movement into its

developmental initiatives for women. It further invites the participation of movement

activists and thinkers to give such initiatives their shape and structure. Both the state and

the movement, therefore, recognize the power of the state to institute change at the

grassroots. The bureaucrat is aware of his own mandate in the name of the state to

determine the language of development and, through it, maintain the stature of the state

as its principal progenitor. He knows he can take an idea, select the “right people,” and

subsequently transform the idea into a program of action.

The women’s movement, in contrast, has made the state the object of its critique

because it demands accountability for what the state can engender as an institution. But

when the need to address it became important? These questions emerged, however, after I had completed

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often the movement has despaired about the post-colonial state, that it promotes too much

development without giving serious thought to why most of it fails to improve the human

condition. The cause of the failure, it is argued, is found in the assumption about people’s

existential realities, rather than their honest understanding. The state, in turn, has paid lip

service to the women’s movement.

Like the colonial state had criminalized all expressions of protest against it, the

post-colonial state carried on the tradition in some fashion. It had to maintain its own

legitimacy as separate from its predecessor through constitutional promises of gender

equality. However, it claimed only onto itself the ability to construct an objective reality,

transform it, and also keep track of such changes. The MS, however, became

representative of an underlying possibility of a contentious objective reality. It allows us

to ask under what conditions the state begins to speak the language of the women’s

movement and how that translates into women’s lives at the grassroots. A feminist

theoretician, explaining the genesis of MS, said that only when a bureaucrat has the

humility to realize that the government cannot know everything can the operational

realities of women’s movements inform or change development and policy.

But if sensitivity in policy is contingent upon the humility of bureaucrats, then

why did such sensitivity-humility manifest itself only in 1989 and not before?

Bureaucratic humility, in turn, became contingent upon development frameworks that

began reconstituting in the 1990s, according to experiences of the grassroots women’s

movements in the third world. The legitimacy of development and of the institutional

my discussion with VR, but still are well worth considering. 212

frameworks that built their reputation on dispensing development was contingent upon

the approval of the grassroots. Development was cast anew and through the aegis of

multiple institutions and agents in the 1990s.

MS is also a particular moment when the discourse of international development

meets the discourse of nationalism. In the conception of the program, the two discourses

operate in conjunction, while also reconstituting themselves in a reconstituting

international political and economic order. The bureaucrat’s articulations in this regard

are particularly illuminating. He admits to having the power to institute a program such as MS. His closeness professionally to the prime minister allegedly facilitated the inclusion of the term empowerment within the program. He claimed “illham” (inner revelation) in the way he selected program writers and consultants and earned women’s faith in the possibilities of the program. He was also aware of the considerable influence he had, as Secretary of Education, with funding agencies abroad.

Education is an evergreen developmental subject for which there is never a dearth of financial support because it is non-threatening to the status quo of institutional frameworks. The education secretary knew that foreign funding for the program would allow for an easier passage of the program through the Ministry of Finance. Given the government’s record in educational spending that has remained consistently below or the same as 4% of the total budget since independence, the success of MS was contingent upon the availability of funds from outside.

The education secretary here debates even the notion of the “outside.” He prefers

European funds to American funds. He particularly dislikes the American disrespect for

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“indigenous” talent and ideas. He argues that USAID, in particular, uses funds as a means to fashion development in the Third World according to neoliberal economic models. The agency in question ensures that they have representative and operational control of the project from its inception to its closure. When the educational secretary articulates his displeasure with the American model of development, by saying that “we in India are perfectly capable of building our own capacity,” he reconstitutes the discourse of nationalism within the context of a national political crisis in an international post-cold war scenario.

As a prime minister answers to allegations of corruption and bribery in an international arms deal, the developmental bureaucracy plays its part in maintaining the functions of the state as usual, but in light of neo-liberalism. Even as the bureaucracy accepts the inevitability of liberalization and structural adjustment programs, it resists them at the ideological level. It rejects American modes of development funding, yet accepts the European forms. This is why an Indian nationalism, structured along the socialist-Marxist axes, finds its new home in European developmental initiatives for the

Third World. In the absence of the Soviet Union, the Scandinavian countries, in particular, with their socialist affinities in economy and society, became the new strategic partners to Third World nations such as India. Therefore, nationalism as discourse and strategy was reconstituted safely in the context of Anglo-American liberalism in the

1990s.

The other aspect of internationalism was Charles Borlaug’s HYV technology that the Ford foundation funded to universalize in Third World countries such as India. The

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indigenous expert further attested to its conduciveness to the indigenous terrain because he was internationally trained to do so. The development experts are often those who have received higher degrees abroad, principally America, and return to their birth nations to transplant their experiences and make their training useful in a developing terrain.

This was also the particular case of the agriculture expert in the context of the green revolution. His nationalism was located in his return and thus he could contribute to a modernization strategy initiated by the government. His internationalism came into play in terms of content and method of the implementation of the strategy. In fact, he played the part of the negotiator who interconnected two discourses and their effects at the grassroots.

In the context of MS, the theoretician tailored an international discourse on education and women’s empowerment to the local women’s realities. But the tailoring process itself combined colonial rationalities with a nationalist-Marxist discourse on education and its “true purpose.” In other words, a reformed regurgitation of the colonial project on education in the 19th century, towards women’s agency in the 21st century, made sense within the political terrain because it echoed a nationalist-Marxist tradition.

The feminist theoretician criticizes the national educational system for continuously “promoting the personal good of the people, but that personal good never matches the collective good.” She further calls this a “dichotomization between personal success and the good of the people.” She feels that the government laments creating such a dichotomization without realizing how its educational structure promotes the same.

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Therefore, the task of the government ought to be reform in the educational system that

gives the greatest numbers equal opportunity to change their lives and that of the others.

The theoretician deploys here the Benthamite principle towards national

educational reform in the same way that colonial theoreticians such as James Mill evoked

the principle in the 19th century towards formalizing a colonial policy on education that

made English the principal mode and content of instruction. Both theoreticians, even

when separated by centuries, use the same principle to restructure a strategy (education)

towards reconfiguring a nationalist identity. Their articulations, in turn, are made possible

and considered according to the imperatives of a changing international context.

In the 19th century, a nationalist-colonial government wanted to eke out its own identity as separate from the global-colonial government or the Crown. If, in the past, the

issue of educational reform had been the battle of contention between the two governing

bodies, which is how the Crown attempted to control the national-colonial government, in

the 1830s, the latter assumed control over local governance by instituting a policy on

education that was only English. This move did not split the relationship. The colony was

important to the Crown for economic and ideological purposes. The English colonial

pride and treasury were contingent on the colony. In turn, the national-colonial

government required that the Crown endorse its policies such that its legitimacy as a

government was maintained locally.

In the 21st century, and particularly in the 1990s, educational reform for women is

reconstituted at the crossroads of a crisis in international and national governance. Yet, a

national educational policy and an education program for women finds its form through

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the processes of economic liberalization, whose success itself was premised on the

discourse of reform through education of the masses. The theoreticians then play a

critical role in the specific forms and projects that modern governmentality becomes

premised on, while maintaining the sacrosanctity of the institutions through which it is deployed.

The question still concerns the education that will empower women. What is this empowerment that women will experience as a result of an education? James Mill did not write about India from his experiences of being there. He wrote without stepping foot in the region and yet determined its future through his writing. The theoretician also determined a national policy on education. However, the female theoretician’s forcefulness in endorsing the critical importance of education for women in particular is born of her own experiences as woman and her training in Marxist-feminist philosophical

traditions. She also realizes that her influence on policy may principally be due to her

professional friendship with the bureaucrat, but considers the operational reality of the

women’s movement as difficult to ignore in a context where policy processes are being recast.

Women’s agency is therefore couched in Marxist terms. Collectivity as the condition and source of empowerment is emphasized. Education, it is argued, should act to promote such collectivity such that the notion of a self emerges from the experience of the former. However, this self must disengage from the collective only at a cost to itself.

Without a collective, women’s individual struggles are in vain. The existence of a collective means the woman question persists, but it also means that its answer lies in the

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mobilization of the group. However, a collective’s work is never finished because there

are several levels or causes of women’s subordination with intersecting histories.

Alternately, a collective to be owned by women for themselves takes consistent

mobilization towards a commonly identified cause. Education therefore must feed into

this struggle towards women’s empowerment. Education thus cannot become the end or

be reduced to a privilege of few individuals. It must remain an instrument towards

women’s collective struggle and their subsequent liberation from histories of social and

political control. This sophisticated Marxist reasoning sharpens the edge of a national

policy on women. However, the same reasoning struggles to be meaningful in the local

context where long-standing perceptions of education determine how women make it

useful or not in their individual or collective lives.

The Marxist-feminist discourse on education and empowerment, along with

procedures of its institutionalization in a local terrain, combined to produce similar and

contradictory effects therein. For the theoretician, the alleged failure of women’s

collectives at the village level does not lie at the point of contradiction between an elite’s critique of mainstream education without understanding the complicated ways in which the subject-other covets what it is historically excluded from, and for such fundamental reasons such as economic opportunity, what education provides. For the theoretician, the subject’s perception of education is a result therefore of false consciousness. This prevents them from seeing education as the instrument to develop a larger picture of women’s liberation rather than self promotion. Self promotion, it is contended, is not the

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failure of policy or its discursive content, but rather subjects’ inability to question their

own perceptions about institutional realities.

If we further examine the process of framing a national policy on education with a

special emphasis on women’s empowerment, we observe a contentiousness that questions

the homogeneity of women’s movement in regard to questions about women’s agency.

We also see how a particular discourse is made dominant through selective alliances and

where the democratic process of participation and debate would serve only as a strategy

to give the policy its required mandate. The debates, however, show why the effects of

policy at the grassroots contradicted its elite level discourse and why an education for

women did not foster collectives for and by women in the local context, as contended by

the theoretician.

Unlike the theoretician’s contention that the problem lay with local women’s

failed consciousness regarding the purpose of education, the debates showed that the

problem was found in the alliance between the government and a particular feminist

discourse on agency. In her narrative, the theoretician expressed her doubts about

experimentation within the state departments that are designed instead for maintenance.

She even agreed that the government can pre-empt or co-opt agendas from people’s

movements and therefore kill such movements. Why then is this critique of the

government not made available in the context of either the national policy on education

or the MS program? In fact, why are other similar critiques of the policy and the program not considered at the moment these are being instituted?

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Even as the theoretician exalts the democratic process (organization of country- wide discussion forums) adopted to give the policy and the program its final shape, she characterizes emerging critiques and critics of policy as those without a vision for social change. A similar view is expressed by a program writer/consultant, who was later involved with organizing and monitoring the 42 consultations organized to give concrete shape to the MS program in 1989. She too became concerned with positive remarks regarding the government sponsored programmatic intervention. A fundamental critique of the program as the promotion of a neoliberal government agenda was rejected as a cynical argument of cynical feminists. Instead, the positive skepticism and support was collected as the final mandate on the program from the women’s movement in India.

Thereafter, the task of the consultants became creating structures for its implementation at the district levels in states identified for this purpose.

It is therefore important to show that government controls are implicit even when the process of making a program is shown to be without such controls. Even as the consultant describes her own freedom in conceptualizing an open-ended program for women, she functions within parameters (e.g., time, space, resources) set by the government. She writes the program in a radical language, but a language that is first approved by the government. Empowerment would not have been inserted into a national policy on education if the prime minister or even the bureaucrat had shown reservations with its implications for the government.

Government control of the MS program, therefor, is not as recent or as stringent as in 2001. It was woven into the process through which the policy was instituted in

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1989. The fact that the program was to be institutionalized as a society or NGO at the district level, but functioned under the mandate and authority of the government of India, circumscribed possibilities of its growth organically and as determined by local necessities.

The consultant seems particularly proud of the absence of explicit directions or rules of conduct by the government, especially at the time the program was instituted in government identified “backward” regions of the country. She is proud that the program was allowed to find its own meaning and identity locally, without government intervention. However, this speaks more about a new mode of governmentality than absence of governance. Its re-inscription is contingent upon locally developed meanings of education, rather than on its dominant or mainstream forms. As strategies of conscientization manufacture a demand for information, its supply in particular forms becomes formalized. Structures and formalized processes of intervention are then easier to manage, control, and own, especially for the government.

MS’s claim to being an innovative program is premised on two facts: one, it was built from the lessons learned from previous policies that allegedly failed and, two, regular bureaucratic and budgetary controls were deliberately reduced to give the program its independent form. Instead, a new set of program managers with feminist sensibilities were recruited to give the program its vision and direction. Therefore, the local projects determined the flow of funds from the state and national level ministries.

The local team also had the freedom to write proposals and seek funding for them from alternate sources. But this is also where the term “innovation” gets problematized.

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The Women’s Development Program (WDP) is considered the predecessor to

MS. WDP, instituted in Rajasthan in 1983, was also a government program for women’s empowerment. Its problem, according to the consultant, lay in its structure and mandate.

WDP did not encourage the development of village level collectives, only village level activists. In the absence of a collective, it was argued, the saathins were rendered vulnerable to community- and caste-based hostility. The extreme example of such hostility was the gang rape of a saathin by men from the dominant Gujjar caste in 1995.

But the program’s failure did not lie in the absence of a collective because it is difficult to argue that the saathins had been unable to organize collective support for their reform work in their respective villages. Programmatic failure is instead located at the intersections of institutional hierarchies that circumscribe and render female agency ineffective and powerless. Why is it that a government program worker raped on her job by upper caste men found herself abandoned by the program and the government that instituted the program for women’s empowerment? A BJP-led government protected its electoral constituency by protecting the Gujjar men accused of the crime and deploying the power of the state to render the testimony of a low caste paid worker as a lie. WDP became defunct thereafter and had remained so until 2003. Such developments should have been articulated as cautionary notes for the future of MS as a government mandated, rather than a government, controlled program. However, they were not.

The consultant, in her support of the innovativeness of the MS program, articulates instead the similarities between MS and the programs that preceded it. Her critique of DWCRA, a rural woman and child welfare program instituted in the 1970s, is

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that its concept of women’s collective was never communicated to the last level. For a program to be successful, its meanings must be communicated or negotiated, especially with those whose identity is contingent upon such a process.

According to the consultant, if the program as a whole is to survive, each participant in the program must feel a sense of ownership regarding its various components. This sense of ownership can be transferred only through communication of the concept down the ladder of participation. She also says, “maybe the communication is only of the project concept in a participatory setting but even a standard concept like this can make for an enriching discussion.” She adds further, “when a government is conceptualizing such programs (e.g., DWCRA) it takes the help of people who are community oriented, but when it comes to operationalization, it gets cast in stone or in government orders that people down the line do not understand.”

Even though the two statements refer to two different programs, they are connected in the particular functions of governmentality. Concepts such as communication and ownership function as strategies of governance, through which the latter is legitimized. Engrafting a program requires the consent of those it is meant to govern. Consent is manufactured through communication of an idea—that education for women can be useful and empowering. Women’s desires are elicited to specifically show how the idea will work for them.

Even as the idea claims to address real women’s real lives, it is not the result specifically of a movement-based and articulated need of the grassroots for such an intervention. It is, however, accepted at the grassroots that such interventions do happen

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as part of political governance. It does not really matter whether the managers of the program are men or women or the program is innovative. Governance always takes a prescribed course in subject making and subject production.

If DWCRA was considered to be a failure for not producing a notion of village level collectivity because the idea itself was not communicated to the women, MS failed too, even as it did everything that was not done in DWCRA. MS began with organizing sanghas at the village level and communicating the importance of information towards collective mobilization for change therein. However, it was an education program that was funded by the government of Netherlands for its educational projects at the grassroots.

Collectives consequently became marginalized in the effort to launch literacy projects, vocational training, and schools for women. Institutionalizing education became the imperative of a program that initially was premised on fostering women’s collectivization at the village level. In fact, the rationale for the educational projects was abstracted from the collectives’ struggles for the right to information or even the right to

clean water in the village. Government accountability now became premised on women’s

literacy and education rather than their sustained collective struggle. In DWCRA, the

importance of a collective may not have been communicated, but in the MS, not only was

it communicated, but it also was strategically constructed to institutionalize education and

women’s agency within it. In the process, collectives were set up for their eventual failure

in MS, a program that claimed to do better than DWCRA.

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One can still claim that at least the budgetary restrictions, as with all other

government programs, were absent in MS. The budget was “open-ended,” in that money was made available to the district office as per emerging projects. The government did not cut into the project requirements according to the funds available (because it was considered more than enough and drawn from the taxpayers’ money in the Netherlands rather than from the planned or unplanned budget of the government of India). Instead, the local needs determined the funding. However, there were internal controls set up to structure the outflow of funds, as is the case with any government planning.

Additionally, the government of the Netherlands needed to know, in precise numbers how, its taxpayers’ money was being used to empower women in Banda, for example. Indo-Dutch evaluation committees were set up to monitor the program in all its areas of operation (geographical and otherwise). These committees met annually and made suggestions and recommendations regarding the program. Therefore, the open- ended nature of policy was again a rhetorical strategy and a mode of governance. It made the new managers feel more secure and more experimental in their new roles and in the new context of their work. The open-ended budget served to plant the roots of a new program and a new mode of governmentality. Ambiguity of a policy-budget functions therefore to give concrete shape to a policy as well as to the nature of governance that will ensue from it.

In summary, for the elites, empowerment for women lies in their collective identity and mobilization. They articulate therefore a Marxist notion of power and of empowerment. Simultaneously, they also address the problem of education. If education

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has individualized the experience of empowerment, then only in its reform could

empowerment, as articulated within the program, be realized. Therefore, education was to become the means to an end—women’s collective empowerment.

The institutionalization of education, however produced the new elite, individual women with individual dreams of reaching new heights of professional success.

Collectivization lay by the wayside, unconsidered and forgotten. Marxist predictions of a collective struggle for women’s rights never materialized in and through institutionalized education. In fact, institutionalization subverted the process of collectivization. However, the elites refused to acknowledge institutionalization and, instead, transferred the responsibility for such “failure” on local women. They rejected manifestations of any form of empowerment that were anything other than collective-based. If education was expected, in its locally sensitive form, to foster a diversified women’s struggle, its institutionalized character served only to subvert such a possibility. The elites were aware of such problem, but preferred to question instead local women’s lack of will and enterprise towards forging such a movement locally.

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CONCLUSION

The MS policy document declared education to be the source of women’s empowerment. It defined empowerment as conscientization or the ability to question reality as a means to change it. This process required women’s collectivity. If there is a shared woman-condition across hierarchies of caste, class, religion, where these hierarchies also mediate such a condition, then education can not only highlight such a causal dynamic, but also become the means to foster a community of women. Only as a community can women change their shared condition. Women’s individual empowerment, in other words, lies in their collective identity and identification with a collective. Further, the contention of the policy makers was that economic wherewithal would follow from such an education, but not at the cost of conscientization.

This emphasis on conscientization to change women’s condition emerged from a critique both of cultural practices that deny women access to education and educational practices in the context of mainstream schooling that remain far removed from people’s actual lives. Education trains people to be selfish and self-sufficient, but not to promote the greatest good for the greatest numbers. Therefore, to empower rural women (i.e., to forge a women’s community) required a new kind of education, an education that would emerge from and address women’s lived realities. This is what the elites, those in a position to administer policy level changes, contended.

However, education at the grassroots produced different experiences of empowerment because education itself developed in different forms therein. Education, as information gathering, as technical training, and as curriculum instruction, was used to

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foster women’s community at the grassroots. However, it produced instead disparate

groups of women, whose lives and purpose became disconnected from each other’s over

time. The sanghas, or the village level collectives, had no commonality of purpose with

handpump mechanics or MSK.

As education became institutionalized (structured and in ways similar to

mainstream schooling) it also became more hierarchized. MSK acquired the top-tier in

such a hierarchy, especially as demand for it among adolescent girls reached new levels

each year, beginning in 1995. Sanghas, however, have remained at the bottom tier of such

a hierarchy and later served primarily as conduits to new recruits for MSK. Therefore,

information for action became secondary to curriculum instruction; fostering the sanghas

became secondary to fostering the MSK over time; and fostering a movement became

secondary to institutionalization of education.

It can be argued that MSK’s curriculum was radical in that it was context-specific.

It was written in Bundeli and Hindi, it discussed local issues within the framework of scientific theories and national political processes, and was transacted exclusively by local women/teachers. However, the elite perception of MSK as a radical space was counteracted by the local women’s perceptions of MSK as a school for women and girls, where none existed in the city-village. To them, empowerment was in competing to

belong to a school, similar to the ones their brothers or children went to. Empowerment

was in being inclusive, and not exclusive, of the mainstream schooling. Therefore, they

saw MSK as their alternative to a mainstream school and one to which they could belong.

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This perception also served to structure MSK as a mainstream school for girls.

The women and girls insisted on routines within the school, such as the morning assembly, ringing bells before each class, and a classroom like setting for each lesson

(with tables and a sitting mat). They also insisted on comparing the MSK curriculum to the regular school curriculum. This was their way of assessing their own competencies vis à vis the mainstream and therefore MSK’s legitimacy as a school vis à vis other schools in the city.

MSK’s radical potential (to change social realities in favor of women) was also neutralized by its changing demographics in passing years. It was primarily a school for adult women, who had never had the opportunity to go to school. Adolescent girls were invited to the school because there was an overwhelmingly demand from this group. Yet, the emphasis on MSK as a school for women was consistently put forth by the district level managers and consultants. However, as education became institutionalized and reflected, in particular, the desires of its adolescent population, adult women were excluded from successive MSKs.

MSK or Mahila Shikshan Kendra (center for women’s education) became Kishori

Kunj (center for girls’ education) in the late 1990s. If MSK became identified with MS, and if, in later years, MSK excluded adult women from its fold, even as sanghas were neglected at the village level, then MS’s initial mandate to empower women, specifically by fostering their collectivity, was clearly subverted. In fact, institutionalizing of education, specifically in the form of MSK, served to problematize the idea and reality of women’s collectivity and of an empowerment emerging from such a collectivity.

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Even as institutionalization of education failed to foster women’s collectivity and

agency, it fostered, in the words of the local women, their individual agency. It

empowered the sahyoginis, the sahelis, and the learners in similar and different ways.

According to the sahyoginis, in their job to create sanghas at the village level, they

experienced self-empowerment. Developing the sanghas and observing their effects on

socio-cultural practices at the village level gave the sahyoginis a sense of self and of the

possibility of change. Developing the sanghas gave the sahyoginis the power to

distinguish between knowledge and empowerment; between understanding (a condition)

and self-identification (born of such understanding and needed to change such a

condition).

The sahyoginis learned to set one’s desires and needs apart from cultural

imperatives and norms. They learned to be single, happy, and eager to educate a daughter in every way possible, rather than live in a festering marriage in which violence was predicated on a woman’s “inability” to produce a son for posterity. Even if this new condition or sense of empowerment was not applicable to all sahyoginis within the program, it is still an effect articulated by some of them in relation to their job. It still provides a glimpse into the nature of individual empowerment; a result of fostering women’s collectives and observing its reforming effects on gender-biased practices at the village level.

Besides the sanghas, the sahyoginis also supervised the sahelis or teachers. To address the literacy needs of a community, centers (open-air gatherings) were organized at the village level. Basic language primers were transacted here, but with the larger focus

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on ascertaining and addressing, through such a provision, women’s articulated dilemmas.

The sahelis had some formal schooling, but enough to transact a language primer at the village level. So the sahelis’ experiences vis à vis the program was organized around imparting literacy skills in the centers and encouraging more women and girls to join it.

The centers therefore functioned as precursors to MSK.

MSK was a more “evolved” form of the centers. It was a proper school with a defined space for its different activities. There was a classroom, a library, a courtyard to conduct morning assembly or to learn to ride a bicycle, sleeping rooms, and a verandah to cook and eat meals three times a day. The building had an iron gate that was manned by a chowkidaar (guard). Like the sahyoginis’ empowerment was found in developing the sanghas, the sahelis’ empowerment was found in structuring MSK, especially its curriculum. Their evolution as teachers or those who know and confidently transact knowledge to the learners also served to institutionalize MSK.

The knowledge that the sahelis garnered in order to teach was exhaustive, but did not change the quality of their relationships outside of the school. The money from their job as sahelis served to enhance the quality of their lives (how they lived and ate), but not their marital relationship. Social relationships continued to be defined by cultural norms, and the knowledge at MSK remained unused towards a radical re-evaluation of the terms of the relationship as well as the cultural norms that kept it in place. For example, producing a male offspring is critical to a woman’s identity in the social space of Banda.

In her inability to produce such an offspring, her womanhood is berated and questioned.

Thus, a woman’s self-empowerment, within the contours of a cultural space, is her

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reproductive capacity that also takes precedence, in patriarchal terms, over her productive

capacities. Unlike the sahyoginis, the samajh (about a condition) did not translate into aatmsaath (questioning norms for the sake of self) for the sahelis. Instead, it was more about negotiating the terms of such norms in a relationship and to keep such a relationship, despite its problems.

Therefore, the knowledge within MSK did not serve to empower the sahelis in the

same way fostering the sanghas did for the sahyoginis. Institutionalization of information

neutralized its potential to be used to radically change social relations outside of MSK or

even to create a collective within MSK that could exist beyond MSK. Institutionalization

individualized the experience and expectation of MSK-style education. The learners used

it as their stepping stone to mainstream schooling beyond grade six.

The sahelis, in comparison, added MSK to their resumes. The imperative of

structuring MSK included hierarchizing the relationship between teachers and students.

Initially both stood on equal ground. The sahelis’ fragile skills in transacting a curriculum

were obvious in the classroom and the learners sensed and questioned it. They questioned

the teachers’ legitimacy in their particular roles. Consultants on MSK from Delhi were

aware of such a dynamic and struggled to develop the skills of the teachers and to ensure

that their legitimacy was maintained in the eyes of the learners. This also ensured the

formalization of the hierarchy and of an institutionalized transaction of education within

MSK.

The experience of MSK for the learners, therefore, was different from the

experience of the sahelis. Institutionalized education served to reform or normalize an

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existing agency. Most of the learners who enrolled in MSK were already strong

personalities. Each woman had a reason to be in MSK. Each had fought to be there. MSK

was an opportunity to be in school finally, and MSK, they hoped, as did their families,

would make them worthy for further education and finally for a job. Many younger

recruits had dreams of becoming teachers in high schools and colleges because there is

prestige and job security in teaching. Therefore, each recruit at MSK had a specific and

articulated reason to be there.

In contrast, the elite expectation from MSK was that it would better inform

women, but also equip them intellectually to make pro-self choices, irrespective of social

opposition. MSK was expected to make a significant intervention in the women’s critical

thought process that could serve women better in terms of their future real life choices.

Therefore, from the beginning, there was a contradiction between the rationale for MSK

and the expectations of its subjects for such an intervention. Further, this contradiction

foregrounds the different notions of women’s agency as emanating from the same

intervention. The agency that local women exhibited to enroll into MSK was expected as

the result of MSK. Further, the agency that local women exhibited at the outset was

reformed in its mediation through MSK and rendered as basic as doing a government job.

MSK provided young learners competencies in language and numeracy that later facilitated their entry into grade five at the local schools. The sahelis’ experience in

teaching added to their resume and prospects for a future in teaching. A radical

curriculum that informed local and women-specific issues in all their social, political, and

economic dimensions, so as to inspire collective action by women themselves, failed to

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inspire this collective action. Politics of water became just as much a piece of information

as did scientific explanations around water tables in different topographies. The information did not transfer from beyond the institutionalized space of MSK onto to the social space. This again is a striking contrast to instances earlier in the program when a discussion of water as a right of every citizen in the village had led women to demonstrate against the apathetic water board in downtown Karwi.

Among other things, the women felt the power of information in forging a collectivity and collectivity as a means for asserting their rights and redressing critical survival issues. MSK, however, failed to enforce the connection between information and action. Its school-like rules and regulations circumscribed the potential of the information to fostering action in the name of women within the region. The unarticulated assumption was that, if being in MSK was a personal and negotiated choice, then the women would know how to use the MSK experience to fight for women’s rights.

Collectivity, consciousness, and movement through education, however, were never strategically linked at MSK. Therefore, the experience of MSK education became an isolated and exclusive experience, one that became identified more with regular schooling, even if the method of transaction of information was innovative, than with developing women’s collective identities in a hostile social and economic environment.

If in institutionalizing education, MSK served to subvert women’s collective

agency, it also served to isolate adult women from its fold. The adult women could do

little with this education in their future, except pass the materials on to their school going

children. Their age would not allow them access to mainstream schooling. The

234

curriculum was too elaborate to hold any specific meaning for specific everyday issues of

survival and the curriculum only had meaning within the context that it was transacted.

MSK’s experience therefore was also mediated according the age category of its recruits.

It empowered the adolescent women to plan for further education in their future, but

excluded adult women from defining a future with the same level of competencies as the

adolescent women. Institutionalization of education then empowered some and not

others. This therefore defeated the avowed purpose of the program to empower adult

women. There were no collectives formed as a result. Maintaining a relationship between

information and action was lost in the effort to structure an innovative curriculum for

women. In terms of the program’s mandate to foster women’s empowerment through an

education that fosters women’s collectivity, MSK did the opposite.

The other important question concerns the fact that, if institutionalized education,

in terms of its particular effects on women’s collective agency, undid the mandate of the

program, then how is the problem received and analyzed by policy makers? What do

academics and coordinators have to say on the unrealized potential of education,

especially in its institutionalized form? Did they think that the policy had failed because

education was institutionalized or was the problem one of reception at the grassroots?

For the elites, the problem was one of reception. The women at the grassroots failed to use the intellectual resources at their disposal to change social rules and make the government more accountable to the rights of individuals beyond caste/class hierarchies. The elites used their definition of empowerment as the gauge for whether education took the necessary form required to induce such an effect at the grassroots. If

235

empowerment did not manifest itself as emanating from women’s collectives, then

education had failed and so had the functionaries of the program who instituted it in

different ways.

The failure of education, according to the elites, to empower women collectively

was nowhere more evident than in the program’s bureaucratization in the late 1990s.

Allegations of embezzlement and corruption marred the status of the program in Banda.

The program functionaries (new or old) had lost their perspective on the program. The

women in the program identified more with its particular components than the program or its particular mandate. Therefore, they did not form a united front against the program’s bureaucratization. Even as they were united in their critique of the changing, non-feminist orientation of the newer management, they remained fragmented in their efforts to question and prevent such changes within the program.

If the MSK women were alienated from the sanghas and therefore remained unaware of their declining status in the program, the sangha women also remained distanced from the particular plight of the sahelis, as MSKs were shut down in 2001. The absence of a collectivity and of a collective identification that was gendered, rather than institutional, served only to disempower women at the grassroots.

The women of MS became separated by their training/education and position within the program. Institutionalization of education served to maintain, rather than question, the institutionalized practice of violence against adult women from the lowest

castes/classes in the region. Banda boasted of a dramatic rise in women’s literacy, almost

50%, between 1990 and 2001. UNESCO recognized the district for its sterling

236

achievement. The question and concern that remains, however, is whether such a statistical change in literacy training for women necessarily made them free of violence within the family and a community. A woman headman of a village in Banda can be the token representative of women’s social empowerment through literacy/education (she attended different literacy training sessions and was enrolled in MSK as well). She is also a valued correspondent for a women’s newspaper in Karwi (Khabar Lehriya). But she continues to suffer violence at the hands of her brother-in-law (her husband is dead) and is often forced to make decisions in her position with which she herself may be uncomfortable. If this is true by her admission, then education within MS had indeed complicated the idea and practice of women’s empowerment. Institutionalization of education then complicated the experience of empowerment at the grassroots, which in turn, produced its most intense critique at different levels.

237

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257 VITA

Shubhra Sharma was born in Delhi, India, on December 29, 1969, the daughter of

Vijay Lakshmi and Gopal Krishan Sharma. After completing her work at Rotary Public

School in Gurgaon, India, in 1989, she entered the University of Delhi, Delhi, India. She

completed her Bachelor of Arts in Political Science in 1990. During 1990-1994, she attended Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi, India. Here, she was awarded two Masters degrees in Political Science and Philosophy. She worked in the meantime with an NGO in Delhi on issues of governance and women’s education. She earned a concentration in

Women’s Studies from the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) in 1997 and in the

1998-99 academic year she formally enrolled into the Ph.D. program in Anthropology at the University of Texas at Austin. As a graduate student she has taught undergraduate courses in the department of Asian Studies, Anthropology, Center for Teaching

Effectiveness, and has been a mentor to the student athletes. She was also the co-editor of

SAGAR, a South Asian Graduate Research Journal, sponsored by the Center for Asian

Studies at the University.

Permanent Address: 2619 Hartman St., Apt# 2329, Dallas, Texas 75204

This dissertation was typed by the author

258