The Pennsylvania State University the Graduate School College of Earth and Mineral Sciences SEWA in RELIEF
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The Pennsylvania State University The Graduate School College of Earth and Mineral Sciences SEWA IN RELIEF: GENDERED GEOGRAPHIES OF DISASTER RELIEF IN GUJARAT, INDIA A Thesis in Geography and Women’s Studies by Anu Sabhlok © 2007 Anu Sabhlok Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy May 2007 The thesis of Anu Sabhlok was reviewed and approved* by the following: Melissa W. Wright Associate Professor of Geography and Women’s Studies Thesis Advisor Chair of Committee Lorraine Dowler Associate Professor of Geography and Women’s Studies James McCarthy Associate Professor of Geography Mrinalini Sinha Associate Professor of History and Women’s Studies Roger M. Downs Professor of Geography Head of the Department of Geography *Signatures are on file in the Graduate School ABSTRACT The discourse of seva – selfless service - works within the spaces of the family, community and the nation in India to produce gendered subjects that are particular to their geographic and historic location. This study is a geographic analysis of the discourse of seva as it materializes in the context of disaster relief work in the economically liberalizing and religiously fragmented state of Gujarat in India. I conducted ethnographic research in Ahmedabad, Gujarat during 2002-2005 and focused my inquiry on women from an organization whose name itself means service––SEWA, the Self-Employed Women’s Association. SEWA is the world’s largest trade union of informal sector workers and much has been written about SEWA’s union activity, trade and production cooperatives, legal battles, and micro-credit success stories. However, despite SEWA’s almost 30 years of active engagement in disaster relief, there is not a single text focusing on SEWA’s activism in terms of its relief work. I chose SEWA for several reasons, the most important one being its well defined political ideology and an explicitly stated vision for the ‘Indian nation,’ which is inspired by Gandhian and feminist philosophies. The project emphasizes the spatial negotiations that SEWA workers engage in as they perform their relief work in a complex field dominated by international relief organizations, local caste and religion based groups, national and state establishments and political parties. I argue that SEWA women are able to carve out a niche for themselves in this crowded field, precisely because of their political strategy of labeling themselves as ‘local’ and claiming of their relief work as seva. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS List of Figures……………………………………………………………………... vi Acknowledgements……………………………………………………………… ...vii Chapter 1: SEWA and seva Introduction………………………………………………………………………… 1 Gender, Nation, and Gandhi ……………………………………………………….14 SEWA: An Introduction……………………………………………………………28 Placing the study: a window into Ahmedabad, Gujarat…………………………....33 Methodological perspectives……………………………………………….………46 Dissertation Organization…………………………………….…………………….63 Chapter 2: Viewing seva: theoretical lenses Introduction…………………………………………………………………………67 Seva: The concept……………………………………………………….………….68 Scales of seva……………………………………………………………………….84 Postcolonial Seva: producing the self, the nation and the state…………………….92 Gendered seva: at home in the world ………………………………………….… 109 Seva Sisters………………………………………………………….……………..115 Nation through seva…………………………………………………….....……….119 Gandhi in relief…………………………………………………………………….127 Summary…………………………………………………………………………...131 Chapter 3: Relief as SEWA Introduction………………………………………………………………………..134 Relief as seva, relief as SEWA …………………………………………………...136 SEWA: it’s my mother’s home …………………………………………………...139 SEWA: relief everyday, always …………………………………………………. 150 SEWA’s Shantipath Kendra: towards a Gandhian nation? .....................................154 Summary …………………………………………………………………………..162 iv Chapter 4: SEWA’s ‘seva’ and SEWA’s ‘work’ Introduction………………………………………………………………………. .163 The socio-spatial circuits of seva: family, community, nation ……………………166 SEWA in relief …………………………………………………………………….173 Seva is hard work ………………………………………………………………….180 Sewing the nation/spinning the wheel: Is it seva or is it work? …………………...186 SEWA and earthquake relief ………………………………………………… . ...198 Summary ……………………………………………………………...……………209 Chapter 5: Conclusions …………………………………………………………….213 Bibliography ……………………………………………………………………….219 Appendix A: SEWA’s documentation of relief efforts……………... ………….…230 Appendix B: SEWA’s documentation of income loss in the informal-sector … ….231 Appendix C: India Shinning Advertisements………………… …..……………….232 v LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1.1: Political map of India with Gujarat highlighted……..…………………..….34 Figure 1.2: Physical map of Gujarat showing epicenter of 2001 earthquake…………....35 Figure 1.3: Map of Ahmedabad City showing location of relief camps……...……….…43 Figure 1.4: Detail 1 showing SEWA offices……………………………………………….44 Figure 1.5: A street vendors cart framing the SEWA bank building………….……………44 Figure 1.6: Streets of Ahmedabad……………………………………………….…………45 Figure 1.7: On the way to SEWA Academy………………………………………………..60 Figure 3.1: Ela Bhatt with women’s wing of the TLA, a precursor to SEWA……….……148 Figure 3.2: SEWA as refuge……………………………………………………………149 Figure 4.1: The nation being spun by the spinning wheel…………… ………………210 Figure 4.2: SEWA women at work………………………………………………. …...211 Figure 4.3:‘Livlihood restoration’ at the camps………………….………………….…212 . vi ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS There are so many people that have contributed in so many ways to my dissertation that any acknowledgement would be necessarily incomplete. Below is a humble attempt to acknowledge some of the fairly significant contributions: Writing a dissertation is primarily meant to be a scholarly enterprise and so I will begin with my advisor Melissa Wright. I want to thank Melissa for her continuous support and confidence in me and my project and most importantly for knowing when to encourage my independent forays and when to be the critic. Thanks also to Melissa, Lorraine Dowler and Mrinalini (Minnie) Sinha for fostering my interest in feminist geographies and for being my source of inspiration. I am grateful to James McCarthy for initiating me into thinking about Gandhian political economy and to Minnie for sustaining that thought process. Writing a dissertation is also an emotional journey that intersects with many other events and happenings in one’s life. My five years in the PhD program were accompanied by the birth of two delightful sons: Umang and Aman. It is said and I believe that it takes a village to raise a child (or two). I am indebted to my parents Sudha Sabhlok and Brij Mohan Sabhlok and to my in-laws Bimla Malik and Ram Sarup Malik for sharing with us the joys, pleasures and tasks of raising the two boys. Umang is now almost five and Aman almost two. They too have contributed to this effort by providing the necessary distraction and infectious energy. My friends Kari Jensen, Nasir Khan, Tanuka Bhowmick, Chandrani Ohdedar, Jennifer Fluri and the wonderful South Asia group – I vii could not have survived this journey without them. My best friend and husband Jitesh has been my source of strength in this dissertation and in life. Thank you. Writing dissertations requires institutional support and I have been lucky to be part of the Penn State’s departments of Geography and Women’s Studies. Both these departments have provided productive and warm environments along with the essential financial support. I also wish to thank the Institute for the Arts and Humanistic Studies at Penn State for the summer residency that allowed me to focus on the dissertation in a creative community. I am indebted to the Society of Women Geographers, the Association of American Geographers, and the College of Liberal Arts at Penn State for funding various aspects of my project. Most importantly I am grateful to the women at the Self-Employed Women’s Association (SEWA) in Ahmedabad for sharing with me their lives, struggles and achievements. viii CHAPTER ONE Seva and SEWA Introduction Every Indian girl, is not born to marry. I can show many girls who are totally dedicating themselves to service, instead of servicing one man. Gandhi, ‘Advice to Girl Students’ 1927 ‘Don’t educate your girls too much or they will not be inclined to serve their elders,’ I grew up hearing my relatives trying to advise my parents on the limits of education, especially for girls. There were numerous stories about men and women who, in pursuit of ‘individualistic’ opportunities, abandoned their ‘moral duty’ of performing seva––selfless service––for their families. Then there were the other kinds of stories, about people (mostly men) who ‘sacrificed’ their futures and devoted their lives to seva. As a child, I also had a hard time understanding why my father’s salaried work in the army was considered one of the highest forms of service––desh seva1––while my mother who worked all day between (hardly) paid employment in a school and endless housework at home was not noticed quite as much. This study is a geographic analysis that uses ethnography to examine seva as a process central to the creation of gendered national subjects in contemporary India. Even as a child, it was not hard to see how the nature of prescribed seva differed for sons, daughters, daughters-in-law, sons-in law and so on, and reaffirmed the spatiality of social structures that dominated everyday life. So while the sons were (and are) expected to contribute financially towards their parent’s household (remaining 1 Service for the nation