I heard Durva, a fearless leader in the Indian political party, Shiv Sena (Shivaji's Army) repeat this poetic refrain in many of her public speeches. She invariably received rousing applause and breathless admiration from the audiences she addressed. Many junior party workers and female constituents who listened in awe at the large women's rallies she organized around the elections began to repeat this in their own lives and in their political campaigns; and Durva's leadership style and the words uttered by her sharp but poetic and charismatic tongue traveled across the district helping the political careers and the self-confidence of many junior political hopefuls. It also brought hordes of new political constituents into the party's fold. Many of her constituents at these events, admitted me that “[Durva] is the malkin [landlady)] of us all.”
What can these dynamics tell us about the ways in which grassroots women politicos build charismatic relationships with their constituents and with other women in their political parties. What can it tell us about the ways in which women channel resources through the political system? It is argued that liberal political institutions expand rather than diminish the possibilities for charismatic, transactional politics. In these contexts, electoral outcomes are determined by both symbolic and material transactions between patrons and clients (Schmidt et al. Reference Schmidt, Guasti, Lande and Scott1977; Scott Reference Scott, Schmidt, Guasti, Landé and Scott1977; Scott and Kerkvliet Reference Scott, Kerkvliet, Schmidt, Guasti, Landé and Scott1977). Transactive relationships, particularly those based on material exchange, are widely theorized as relationships of patronage, clientelism, and brokerage (Schmidt et al. Reference Schmidt, Guasti, Lande and Scott1977; Scott Reference Scott, Schmidt, Guasti, Landé and Scott1977; Scott and Kerkvliet Reference Scott, Kerkvliet, Schmidt, Guasti, Landé and Scott1977). For purposes of this article I use the term “transactive” to capture the relational domains of politics and to point to contexts in which these relationships are produced.
In the context of democratic politics in India it has been widely noted that politics is located in transactions of everyday things and in the symbolic and communicative realms of political personality and political obligation rather than on larger, programmatic appeals (Bose Reference Bose2008; Kitschelt and Wilkinson Reference Kitschelt and Wilkinson2006; Purandare Reference Purandare1999). However, accounts of the transactive and clientelist politics of political parties have a tendency to assume that political parties are fixed objects. They often also assume that men and women in political parties experience politics in similar ways, that they produce similar kinds of political constituencies, and that they behave as patrons and clients in the same way. Here I argue that when close attention is paid to those who actually locate themselves within transactions at the lower levels of political parties, it provokes a reorientation of commonly held political categories. It particularly suggests a need to think about political authority in ways that account for different gendered strategies involved in the everyday, transactive domains of politics. This is particularly important to understanding the workings of postcolonial democracies.
In postcolonial democracies women have become increasingly important as political candidates and as political constituents. In the case of India, electoral reservations for women are mandated at the lower levels of the political system. This has created an important space for women to enter the formal political sphere, often at the lowest levels of the political party. These lowest levels are where transactive, relational, symbolic, and charismatic strategies are the most important. Curiously, low-level women politicians in India, barring a few recent and nuanced exceptions (Ciotti Reference Ciotti2012; Govinda Reference Govinda2008; Sen Reference Sen2007; Spary Reference Spary2014), generally are omitted from the literature on political parties. If they have been looked at, their presence was assumed to have only tangential effects on actual party machinations and to the transactive political relationships that are so vital to political life in South Asia (Price and Ruud Reference Price and Ruud2010). In this article, I attempt to rethink and extend the analytical categories available to discuss how women acquire authority through these transactive and symbolic registers at the lower levels of political parties in the Global South. I focus on two women, Durva and Kalpana, who are formidable figures at the lower levels of the Shiv Sena (Army of Shivaji) party in the Western Indian state of Maharashtra. Both women are widely referred to as malkins (landladies) across their political constituencies. The term malkin in its literal sense, connotes registers of class privilege similar to those that apply to the term landlady in the West. However, during my fieldwork, it was often invoked symbolically by both men and women to describe Shiv Sena women who are able to mobilize all kinds of power and not simply material resources; moreover, given that Shiv Sena recruits most of its female cadre from communities that are marginal and resource-poor, the term malkin was particularly important as a term of reference. For many of these grassroots party foot-soldiers authority was produced precisely because they often shared social circumstances with their constituents and were familiar and trusted intermediaries between their communities and the state. Therefore, arguably, this vernacular category of the malkin and the relationships that it produces between women, the political party, and constituents prompts us to reorient the male dominated categories of political authority. It also provokes a move away from assumptions that political authority, political resources, and political transactions travel only through male political actors.
The article makes four key arguments. First, it illustrates, using ethnographic data how the malkin operates through transactional networks of political authority at the lower levels of electoral and party politics in contemporary India. Second, it argues that the malkin cross-cuts several of the extant categories of (male) political authority in the social sciences, such as the big man, the chief, the broker, the patron, and the client (Auyero, Lapegna, and Poma Reference Auyero, Lapegna and Poma2009; Boissevain Reference Boissevain1974; Sahlins Reference Sahlins1963). I particularly decenter the discussion over political transactions and reciprocity, commonly referred to in political studies as patronage. In doing so, I suggest that the malkin may be seen as figure of political matronage. Undoubtedly, malkins routinely utilize patronage connections to the political party. However, this article follows recent work in feminist political science to argue that assessing female politicians’ backgrounds, strategies, and preparations according to norms and categories established by men's longstanding participation discounts and ignores strategies and capabilities that women bring to politics (Beaman, Pande, and Cirone Reference Beaman, Pande, Cirone, Franceschet, Krook and Piscopo2012; Franceschet, Krook, and Piscopo Reference Franceschet, Krook, Piscopo, Franceschet, Krook and Piscopo2012a).Third, through an exploration of the ways in which the malkin constitutes her political authority, I also unsettle the notion of matronage from the mostly Western, economic, and upper-class contexts in which it has been explored (Herrin Reference Herrin2013, James Reference James2001). I suggest that matronage within contemporary politics in the postcolonial world can be looked at as its own political category of material and symbolic authority. While political matronage may draw on available and dominant imaginaries of authority, it is also in an expression of deCerteau's (Reference deCerteau and Rendall1984) “la perruque.” Women utilize distinct formal and informal strategies to carve out semi-independent domains of practice in order to mediate, counter, and often grab material and electoral spoils of urban and political transformation. Finally, the article concludes by suggesting that ethnographic inquiry into those networks of authority, influence, and resources where women clearly act as the focus of support to both male and female constituents encourages us to think of matronage as a distinct and substantive analytical category in studies of women in politics.
METHODOLOGY
This article is based on 10 years of in-depth, ethnographic research with women of Shiv Sena, a regional political party most influential in the western Indian state of Maharashtra. The research was conducted between 2003 and 2013. Over the course of the fieldwork, I lived with several women from this political party in various different cities and rural districts. I traveled with them on political campaigns; I conducted extensive participant observations, interviews, and life histories with them over the course of several years. I also conducted interviews with their families and their constituents and participated in political rallies, public protests, religious rituals, and personal celebrations with my research participants. Because Shiv Sena does not separate its male and female domains of action, I also did several interviews with and interacted with men in the party. In total I followed the political and personal lives of more than 40 women who function at the city, district, and village levels of the party. The women on whom I focus—Durva in the city of Pune and Kalpana in MumbaiFootnote 2 —are only two illustrations of how these matronage networks function within this political party. While both are widely acknowledged by other Shiv Sena women, by their constituents, and by male party leaders as vital animators of political grids in their regions, I do not intend to suggest that their experiences or their strategies can be generalized to all women. As an ethnographic project based on thick description (Geertz Reference Geertz1973) rather than on broadly generalizable data, it is intended to be provocative of how gendered political relationships and networks function on the ground in particular places. In this process it suggests that paying attention to the particularities of women's lives and conditions can broaden how scholarship on gender and politics in the Global South gets theorized. Moreover, there is a rich body of literature that describes women's political and economic engagements through the lens of empowerment (Cruikshank Reference Cruikshank1999, Dutta and Kornberg Reference Dutta and Kornberg2002). This present discussion tries to extend this focus of postcolonial, feminist political studies from debates over empowerment and emancipation to encompass the realities of how female political figures actually “practice” their political lives to create political authority and political networks on the ground (Beaman, Pande, and Cirone Reference Beaman, Pande, Cirone, Franceschet, Krook and Piscopo2012; Bookman and Morgen Reference Bookman and Morgen1998). Drawing from positions taken by feminist political theorists in other parts of the postcolonial world, I am less interested in illustrating whether or not the politics or the agency produced for women can be called aptly “feminist” (Mahmood Reference Mahmood2001). I am far more interested in what actually happens to the nature of political networks as women engage aggressively with political institutions and electoral constituencies in the context of party politics and the failures of the formal state in urbanizing India. It is through this focus on “practice” that the paper contributes to larger debates on gender and politics and feminist approaches to governance and urban politics more broadly.
The first section provides context to the scholarly debates with which this paper engages. The second section provides a brief introduction to Shiv Sena and to the ways in which women have historically been integrated into the party's maverick style of local, direct action politics (Eckert Reference Eckert2003). The third section goes on to locate women's political and electoral participation in India within the context of electoral reservations for women (Krook Reference Krook2006; Kudva and Misra Reference Kudva and Misra2008; Sgier Reference Sgier2004). Indeed, formal political possibilities that electoral reservations promise undergird the informal actions of women who are foot-soldiers for the party. The fourth section will discuss the broader ways in which patronage and brokerage have been theorized across the social sciences. It suggests the need to revisit these categories that assume an exclusively male presence within brokerage networks. In this revisiting, it counters assumptions that male political experience and strategies are generalizable even if they are dominant and periodically coopted by politically active women. Sections five and six will present ethnographic data to illustrate the matronage politics of Durva, an appointed leader in the city of Pune, and Kalpana Sate, an elected city councilor in the city of Mumbai. The last and concluding section suggests that ethnographic inquiry into networks of authority, influence, and resources where women act as the focus of support to both male and female constituents encourages us to think of matronage as a distinct and substantive analytical category in studies of electoral politics.
BACKGROUND AND SCHOLARLY CONTEXT
In postcolonial contexts, the vocabulary of empowerment has been vital to the scholarship on gender and political engagement. In India, the discourse of female “empowerment” has become very much a part of state and public vocabulary (Beck Reference Beck2003; Purushothaman Reference Purushothaman1998; Sharma Reference Sharma2006). This discourse on empowerment is deeply intertwined with that of globalization and transnationalism, not least because of the increased presence of transnational, nongovernmental organizations committed to mobilizing women around literacy and economic self-sufficiency (Freeman Reference Freeman2001). Feminist critiques have suggested that discourses of empowerment, particularly in the postcolonial world, have become closely tied to neoliberal technologies of governance where women become part of the state's neoliberal project rather than agentive actors (Hart Reference Hart2002; Sharma Reference Sharma2008). Therefore, while debates over women's empowerment have been vital to studies of women and public and political engagement in the postcolonial world, the lens of empowerment is limiting. This is particularly true when it comes to examinations of electoral politics at the ground level. For one, it has become the language of dominant structures, such as governments and transnational organizations, rather than a form of political engagement shaped by women themselves. Second, it does not adequately capture the informally and incrementally negotiated freedom that emerges out of women's own cultivation of political networks and their efforts at channeling political and economic resources. No doubt the women I describe here use the formal institutions, such as electoral reservations, that target women's uplift and empowerment. However, while these formally granted institutions provide the background to the kinds of politics that I am most concerned with here, they fail to encompass the wide variety of ways in which women actually acquire political authority or how they come to be seen as powerful among their constituents.
Therefore, in making an argument for how political matronage functions, the paper moves away from the debates over empowerment to locate itself in two broad but overlapping debates in the scholarship on gender and politics of modern South Asia. First, there is the literature on electoral reservations for women in India. This article argues that the background of electoral reservations is vital to the ways in which women perceive political possibility. Second and most importantly it engages with the literature on political patronage and clientelism more broadly and on political fixers, brokers, and intermediaries in South Asia in particular (Anwar Reference Anwar2014; Boissevain Reference Boissevain1974; Kitschelt and Wilkinson Reference Kitschelt and Wilkinson2006; Paine Reference Paine and Paine1971). The paper connects these debates over women's formal participation in electoral politics via electoral reservations and their more informal and symbolic networks constituted through brokerage and reciprocity. Further, the ethnographic focus on grassroots women party workers in Shiv Sena returns to some of the fundamental questions on contemporary electoral politics—through a feminine lens. These questions are centered around how subordinated but innovative and gendered political animators drive everyday political transactions; how both formal and informal political authority and influence are constituted through the site of the political party system; how particular leadership styles and political personality shape political networks at the lowest levels of the political process; and how political parties expand their grassroots networks and their political space in environments of changing electoral mandates through practices of violence and aggression on one hand, and care, nurture, and protection on the other (deVries Reference deVries2002; Hansen and Verkaaik Reference Hansen and Verkaaik2009; Price and Ruud Reference Price and Ruud2010; Sahlins Reference Sahlins1963; Verkaaik Reference Verkaaik2004).
SHIV SENA AND ITS WOMEN'S WING: A BRIEF INTRODUCTION
Shiv Sena, named after 17th-century Maratha warrior Shivaji, was founded in Bombay by former journalist and cartoonist Bal Thackeray in 1966 as a populist, “sons of the soil” movement. The party's initial demand was for preferential employment opportunities for the local Marathi-speaking population (Katzenstein Reference Katzenstein1973). Mobilization through the late 1960s and 1970s continued to be rooted in the demand for preferential policies but evolved in response to socioeconomic shifts in Bombay and Maharashtra more generally (Gupta Reference Gupta1982). By the 1980s the party aligned itself with the majoritarian politics of Hindu nationalism. This is when support spread from the urban center of Bombay to other regions of the state of Maharashtra (Hansen Reference Hansen1996, 2001). In 1995, the alliance between Shiv Sena and the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata (Indian People's Party, hereby BJP) came to power in the state of Maharashtra and changed the name of the city of Bombay to Mumbai (Hansen Reference Hansen2001). Because of the close association of Shiv Sena with large-scale and spectacular anti-Muslim violence and its formal political alliance with the electoral arm of Hindu nationalist politics, the BJP, it has often been difficult to separate an analysis of the party from the broader analyses of Hindu nationalist politics (Bacchetta Reference Bacchetta and Jaffrelot2005; Jaffrelot Reference Jaffrelot2005; VanderVeer Reference VanderVeer1994). Similarly, it is assumed that the party's women's wing is ideologically comparable to other women's wings of the Sangh Parivar (Hindu Nationalist Family). However, for purposes of this article, I suggest that the distinctions are significant. They are significant because Shiv Sena women see their own participation and their public life differently. They go to great lengths to distinguish themselves from other women, including other Hindu women. This is not simply an ideological project but a politically expedient one. Shiv Sena, unlike other Hindutva-allied organizations, such as the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (World Hindu Council; hereby VHP) or the Rashtriya Swayam Sevak Sangh (hereby RSS),Footnote 3 which are ideological units within the Sangh Parivar, is squarely concerned with electoral politics. The imperatives of electoral politics have meant that the party and its individual members regularly choose political positions that are electorally beneficial and ideologically inconsistent. Shiv Sena women are very much part of the party's shifting ideological positions and its electoral pursuits.
While the founding narrative of Shiv Sena is widely known, there is vague official documentation on the founding of the party's women's wing, the Mahila Aghadi, or the Women's Front (Sen Reference Sen2007). The absence of a master narrative is telling, especially given the mythic founding narrative of the larger party (Hansen Reference Hansen2001; Purandare Reference Purandare1999). Women, however, feel that they were politically involved with Shiv Sena's politics long before they were formally organized into the Mahila Aghadi. A senior Shiv Sena woman, when asked about its founding, said, “We [women] have always been in the party; yes, we only got posts Footnote 4 since Mahila Aghadi was formed. But really in Shiv Sena's life, ladies were always there.” Women who have been party members since the 1960s almost always spoke about the Mahila Aghadi as though it were born at the same time as the larger party. This is because they have always identified as Shiv Sainiks, and a later founding myth discounts women's presence in the party's early life. In daily interactions at the cadre-level, neither male nor female Sainiks make distinctions between Shiv Sena and Mahila Aghadi except to distinguish between ladies and gents. Party events and meetings have both men and women present. Women and men alike refer to women as Shiv Sainiks (Shivaji's warriors, a male gendered term). Further, every nominated party post has a male and female appointee. In urban Maharashtra, the party operates through local branch offices with appointed male and female heads of each branch. Until the mid-2000s both male and female appointees were known as pramukhs (chiefs). However, around 2005, the title for women was changed to sanghathak (organizer) while for men it remained pramukh (chief). So there are shakha pramukhs (male party branch chiefs) and shakha sanghathaks (female party branch organizers). This is a significant linguistic distinction and a clear effort to discursively subordinate the women's wing by removing women from the possibility of being chiefs. However, in practice women continue to refer to themselves as pramukhs, as do their constituents. Many women were aware of this effort from senior leadership to discursively tame powerful women in the party: “It is a purush pradhan society” (male-dominated society), many women resignedly told me. Most women counter this subordination by continuing to use the title of chief in interactions with political constituents. Many said that this linguistic subordination is “Just like that. It really makes no difference to what we do, so who really cares. We are still pramukhs.”
POLITICAL PARTIES, POLITICAL LEADERS AND WOMEN'S ELECTORAL RESERVATIONS: A BRIEF INTRODUCTION
At the higher levels of the political party, efforts to alter women's titles as pointed to above are, no doubt, symbolic efforts to subordinate women. It is probably no accident that these efforts began at around the same time that Indian women's electoral presence was constitutionally mandated through reservation of electoral seats (Jenkins Reference Jenkins1999; Menon Reference Menon2009). However, in practice these reservations have enhanced women's capacity to act within existing networks of dependence and subordination. Admittedly neither men nor women in Indian politics are stable political or social categories. Caste, class, and religious cleavages complicate political relationships, not least, the capacity to act as political brokers, mediators, or malkins (Beteille Reference Beteille and Fuller1997; Bhowmik Reference Bhowmik1992; Gupta Reference Gupta2000; Menon Reference Menon2009; Michelutti Reference Michelutti2007). However, what is important to note is that these networks of power are critical in electoral politics where material exchange, political protection, political favors, and obligations constitute how women come to see themselves and are seen as political authorities. The realities of electoral machinations require women to act both as recipients of party patronage and purveyors of it. In this capacity, they move in and out of positions of caretaker, malkin, and client. In this process they produce authority and access not just for their parties but also for themselves and their neighborhoods.
The dynamics of electoral politics have become particularly important for women in political parties in the context of electoral reservations for Indian women at the local levels of politics. Agitations for a greater voice for women in India's legislative bodies began early in the 20th century. In the early 1970s there was a clear articulation that constitutional ideals be put into practice and the status of Indian women put on the national agenda. The recommendation for electoral reservations for women at the local levels of government was issued as part of the Committee on the Status of Women. The proposal for local-level reservations for women finally became part of the 73rd and 74th constitutional amendments in 1991 (Jenkins Reference Jenkins1999; Menon Reference Menon2009; Ray Reference Ray1999). This amendment reserved one-third of electoral seats for women in local administration at the village and district levels, also known as panchayats. By 1993, these reservations were extended to elections for urban municipal councils (Randall Reference Randall2006). In 1996, the 81st amendment bill sought to extend these reservations to the state and national parliaments. This is what is officially known as the Indian Women's Reservation Bill (Kudva and Misra Reference Kudva and Misra2008). Despite some success in 2010, fierce debates over legislative reservations for women in national and state legislatures continues (Beaman, Pande, and Cirone Reference Beaman, Pande, Cirone, Franceschet, Krook and Piscopo2012).
The efficacy of electoral reservations for women (and other minorities) in India continues to be hotly debated and criticized by both the public as well as by feminist political and social science (Menon Reference Menon2009; Narasimhan Reference Narasimhan2002). A resolution of these debates is far beyond the scope of this paper. What I am concerned with here are the potentialities that the presence of reservations provides for women who desire political visibility and formal political opportunities. Indeed, the ethnography suggests that women in political parties perceive the possibilities opened up by electoral reservations as important to the expansion of their political influence. Reservations have led political parties to recruit and court women as electoral candidates even as there are new efforts to maintain women's structural subordination within political parties. For Shiv Sena women, the perceived possibility that these reservations open up for them in formal politics enhances women's capacity and ambition to act effectively within existing networks of (inter)dependence and subordination.
Significant emerging work in feminist political science has explored gender quotas worldwide (Franceschet, Krook, and Piscopo Reference Franceschet, Krook and Piscopo2012b; Krook Reference Krook2009; Phillips Reference Phillips1995). It has shown variation across political systems where quotas exist. Scholars classify quotas into three broad categories: reserved seats, party quotas, and legislative quotas (Krook Reference Krook2009). Reserved seats of the kind that exist in India call for the reservation of one-third of local level constituencies, or wards, for women candidates only. Further, the Indian electoral quota system allocates its reserved seats using random assignment where each constituency is on average reserved for women once every three elections (Beaman, Pande, and Cirone Reference Beaman, Pande, Cirone, Franceschet, Krook and Piscopo2012).Therefore, electoral constituencies shift and change in terms of reservations. Shiv Sena, like most political parties, continues to subordinate women by giving them electoral tickets in women's reserved wards only. Therefore, politically ambitious women are in tenuous positions when it comes to the possibilities of “formal” power because they are rarely allowed to compete for open electoral seats with men. For many Shiv Sena women, this has meant that they work even harder at consolidating other forms of power that come in handy whenever they find themselves in positions of possibility. The inability to count on formal political opportunities conjoined with the always looming anticipation of future possibility that the presence of electoral reservations provides creates an environment akin to what Hansen has called “permanent performance” (Hansen Reference Hansen2001, 227). However, while formal political opportunity doled out by political parties is important, the vitality of political matronage often exceeds formal electoral politics even when it is driven by it.
Despite continuing debate over reservations at the national and state levels, and higher stakes for nationally prominent political players, Shiv Sena, whose appeal is regionally based, is surprisingly unconcerned about outcomes of the reservation bill. Since the party is a populist, regional force and a grassroots ally for national parties, it is most important for Shiv Sena to take advantage of local-level reservations for women already in place. Moreover, given the alliance between the national BJP party and Shiv Sena in Maharashtra,Footnote 5 machinations among political hopefuls in the context of alliance politics are vital to the everyday life of elections. These machinations have not received systematic scholarly attention. However, they are key to transactional politics and charismatic caretaking associated with urban matronage (Spary Reference Spary2007). For the BJP and Shiv Sena, the brokering of a political alliance meant that the parties contested state-level elections together. Party leaders agreed on a power-sharing agreement that involved a strict demarcation of which party could put up an electoral candidate in a particular shared electoral/legislative ward. If an electoral ward was negotiated by party leaders as a BJP ward, only a BJP candidate could compete as the alliance partner there. The same was true for Shiv Sena. Neither could encroach on the other's territory when nominating candidates. This agreement brokered by the top level leadership was severely fraught at the lower levels of Shiv Sena. For women, the potential for candidacy was doubly complicated. Generally, Shiv Sena women receive tickets to contest elections only in ladies’ wards.Footnote 6 They are rarely nominated to compete in a general, unreserved ward with men. Many recognized this as another way for the party to suppress women: As Kalpana, said to me after she lost the nomination to a male Shiv Sainik when her Mumbai electoral ward was reorganized before the 2007 municipal elections: “Most ladies are better known than the men and closer to the people, so we could beat the men in an election; they are afraid of this.” For women, these restrictions severely shrink the pool of electoral possibility. Shiv Sena's reliance on grassroots networks and visibility also mandates that candidates are allowed to contest elections only in wards they live in and are recognized in, thereby further limiting political possibilities. Many Shiv Sena women who lived in designated ladies’ wards were hoping to receive tickets to run for the civic body elections in Mumbai and Pune. However, those who lived in ladies’ wards that were reserved for BJP candidates were annoyed that they would have to cede potential candidacy to a BJP woman. Some even threatened to leave the party to run as independent candidates to escape the constraining will of the party. This resulted in tremendous jockeying by many women party workers to try to get noticed for the chance of an electoral ticket. It also gave rise to intensified projects of campaigning, visibility, transactions, and bargaining with constituents.
However, while these transactional relationships are heightened during election campaigns they both precede and succeed outcomes at the ballot box. Durva, for example never won an election, but she continued to be seen as the malkin. Kalpana in Mumbai did win an election though she recognized the ephemeral nature of her electoral power. She therefore worked much harder to consolidate the networks of influence around her; when her ward was reorganized after her first term as a municipal councilor and Shiv Sena prevented her candidacy in an unreserved ward, almost everyone in the neighborhood continued to come to her for problems rather than to the newly elected male councilor also from Shiv Sena. The latter, everyone said, was too “far away from the people, because he lives in a tower.”Footnote 7
In light of these broader political registers, even as senior, male party leaders engineer the limits of women's formal power, they also have to be strategic in recruiting women as candidates and as campaigners in contexts of electoral reservations. Women, like Durva and Kalpana, who hold positions of trust and influence within neglected urban neighborhoods, have in turn been strategic in giving their support to the political parties they see as furthering their influence in other arenas of their lives. Most importantly, they are key nodes in connecting and mobilizing new constituents to the party. This is critical in urban political environments where electoral wards are becoming smaller, denser, and increasingly localized and where personal involvement in people's lives and problems provides vital political leverage (Kudva and Misra Reference Kudva and Misra2008; Oskar-Lindgren, Inkenen, and Widmalm Reference Oskar-Lindgren, Inkenen and Widmalm2009). Therefore, political matronage of the malkin involves a complex web of authority where women's political practices straddle the everyday as well as formal electoral politics. While these relationships are tied to the mediation of everyday things such as water, electricity, and housing at the margins of India's cities, they are significantly connected to the life of the state in India (Corbridge Reference Corbridge2005, Fuller and Benei Reference Fuller and Benei2001).
BROKERS, BIG MEN, CHIEFS AND PATRONS: WHERE DOES MATRONAGE FIT IN?
The varied expressions of political authority across geography, space, and time have occupied social scientists, particularly anthropologists, political scientists, and political sociologists for decades. In anthropology, Marshal Sahlins‘ (Reference Lepowsky1963) famous differentiation between big men in Melanesia and chiefs in Polynesia suggested that careful attention must be paid to the social, cultural, and historical logics of leadership (Brown Reference Brown1990). Both in response and corrective to Sahlins, Maria Lepowsky's (Reference Lepowsky1990, Reference Lepowsky1993) ethnography on Vanatinai island in Melanesia observed the presence of what she called big women. These women were charismatic leaders in public affairs and admired as influential heroes. However, because men were far more frequently big than women, these female figures have not been taken seriously enough as agents of authority (Brown Reference Brown1990).
Scholarship has continued to engage with male, indigenous actors who command respect, fear, and allegiance (Burt Reference Burt2005; deVries Reference deVries2002; Merton Reference Merton1968; Paine Reference Paine and Paine1971). Anthropologists interested in the varieties of political authority have written extensively on political subjects who constitute authority less through hereditary or official appointment and more through charisma, networks of kinship, and material obligations and exchange. In some contexts, they have been seen as middlemen, men who act within colonial structures of power as native entrepreneurs capable of moving and mediating scarce resources up and down the social system (Rodman Reference Rodman1977). In others they have been theorized as provincial brokers, liaison brokers, and gatekeepers who channel metropolitan resources to provincial areas, often making themselves wealthy in the process (Klinken Reference Klinken2013). In still others they are called meditators (deVries Reference deVries2002).
In postcolonial, urban contexts, scholars working among poor, urban populations also observe the vital place of brokers and fixers in contexts of urban insecurity (Auyero Reference Auyero2007; Auyero, Lapegna, and Poma Reference Auyero, Lapegna and Poma2009; Holzner Reference Holzner2004; Lazar Reference Lazar2008). Because most classical approaches to brokerage and patronage are focused on material exchanges, women, because of lower access to material things, are assumed to be on the receiving end of these networks only. However, the ethnographic data suggest that while there is a materialist element to the relationships of brokerage, the exchange and distribution of material benefit is not enough to sustain these kinds of networks. Indeed, material distribution is not even enough to ensure electoral success. This is why actors at the lower-levels of the political party are so important. In political systems like India where the state is fragmented, brokers are vital in helping people navigate these disarticulated entities. Therefore, it is common that around electoral cycles, efforts to make these connections are heightened. However, the promises of material distribution rarely have an afterlife past electoral campaigns. Therefore, political parties remain embedded in the nonmaterialist domains of poor populations in urban India precisely because their materialist promises fail or are unfulfilled. Shiv Sena recruits its foot-soldiers among women who have gained significant local social and political authority through several informal and embedded domains that, while related to materialist exchange, are far more than that. They do not sustain their authority through the promise of material resources alone, even if the conditions of urban insecurity that they are most successful in demand such resources. What sustains the power of women like Durva and Kalpana is what Auyero, drawing from Bourdieu, suggests are the subjective dispositions that their presence and protection inculcates in those they serve (Auyero Reference Auyero2007). The spaces where the state does not reach are where the registers of presence, charisma, and familiarity of the malkin are most potent.
Scholarship has theorized the dynamics that emerge in spaces where the formal state does not reach, where it pursues other priorities, or where the local networks are too difficult for the formal state to navigate. Various terms have been applied to those who exert power in these regions, such as rogue leaders (Johnson and Soeters Reference Johnson and Soeters2008), dons (Price Reference Price2004), dadas (Hansen Reference Hansen2001), mafia (Johnson and Soeters Reference Johnson and Soeters2008), area leaders (Hansen Reference Hansen2000), or naye neta (new leaders)(Krishna Reference Krishna2011). All these works interrogate the intricacies of mostly male-dominated, violent, illicit networks of power. They encourage us to think very seriously about the relationship between gendered assertions (masculinity) and spatial and extralegal urban protections. For example, in his rich study of male party workers in Shiv Sena, Thomas Blom Hansen explores male repertoires of power through the concept of mardangi (virility/manliness), which he suggests is at the “heart of local registers of respect and eminence” (Hansen 2005, 190). What I find here is that for female Shiv Sainiks, there are other equally gendered expressions of authority—the notion of the malkin being the most dominant.
In India the critical role played by influential local leaders with unique leadership styles has a long history (Brass Reference Brass1984; Dobbin Reference Dobbin1972; Gould Reference Gould1994; Mines Reference Mines1994. Further, India's uneven development and inequalities of access across communities and castes has historically been fertile ground for the rise of intermediaries who mediate between people, states, bureaucracies, and the market in return for political patronage. These intermediaries, periyar (big man), pyraveerkar (the one who follows up on work), dalals (commission agents), and karnams and patels (revenue functionaries), have all been noted as important figures in connecting people to latent political and market resources (Mines Reference Mines1994). Indeed, a key development strategy in postindependence India was a structure of decentralized government with various levels of dispersion between central and local sites of authority. Intermediaries are therefore embedded in the political system, particularly to connect rural populations to urban resources and markets. However, the continued failure to strengthen local governance formally has created vacuums of power in regions that are undergoing change. This is where the murkiness of the Indian state is most illuminated: formal political parties and local party workers step into these spatial and discursive vacuums where the formal state does not reach; however, in this avatar of the intermediary, they are often “informal” and self-appointed leaders, even if they remained affiliated to political parties.
Explorations of these transactional relations generally assume that these transactional relations generally assume that these relationships mark political obligations that operate only between men or between men and subordinate women. If women have been brought into this analysis, they are seen on the receiving end of the network, which places them in subordinate positions vis-à-vis the formal (male-gendered) state. While such definitions are useful in understanding political transactions as a relationship of inequality in general and gender inequality in particular, it does not clearly problematize the relational aspects through which political networks actually work in many urban environments or how women move between positions of local power and broader positions of subordination. As Clark (Reference Clark2001) points out in discussions of the place of women in Christian religious patronage, patron as an analytical category is useful for unpacking class but less useful in unpacking gender. Only women of means, and of ascribed power, like men, have the capability of acting as patrons. Therefore when talking about women who are relatively resource poor but have other forms of symbolic capital such as everyday involvement in people's lives, knowledge of murky urban environments, and access to the formal state through their political party, patronage politics fails to capture the dynamics of authority here.
Further, like discussions of feminine patronage in the arts, women's relationships to authority and patronage are assumed to always be connected to their spouses or to their access to financial, often aristocratic, feudal and monarchical resources (McLeod Reference McLeod2008; Ruggles Reference Ruggles2000b; Stroebel Reference Stroebel2005–2006,). In the case of women in contemporary political parties in India there is a similar assumption that women's political participation is always linked to that of their families or to the privilege of class and caste. At the higher levels of India's political system, family, class, and caste privilege are undoubtedly important to women's electoral success and political influence. However, at the more prominent levels of Indian politics the same privilege and the patronage networks that accompany this authority could well be said to operate in cases of politically powerful men.
In India, as in many other postcolonial contexts, when we shift the locus of analysis away from the highest levels of politics, it becomes impossible not to observe that political authority at the level of local politics is fragmented and dispersed. Here political influence is most concerned with connecting constituents to everyday resources. Admittedly, even at these local levels women are often mobilized by political parties through kinship ties and familial connections. Being a Shiv Sainik is a family affair, and in many cases, entire families are Shiv Sainiks. Therefore, it is easy to assume that party affiliation is guided largely by primary male involvement. While I cannot generalize enough to entirely refute this assumption, only a few of the women with whom I worked entered the party through kin relationships. The large majority entered politics through networks they had built in poor communities to connect people to the state rather than through familial influence. Entrance was often accidental or fortuitous because of a close connection to other networks of everyday mediation such as establishing an NGO for Durva and the running of a balwadi (childcare center) for Kalpana. For many, family involvement in party activities was considerable. But, generally, family members were brought into the Sena through the involvement of the female Shiv Sainik. This countered the commonly held assumption (even my own) that political involvement is always and everywhere led by male access to male patronage. The imperatives of public political participation and local flexibility to organize and host political, educational, and social events for the female electorate propelled many Shiv Sena women into political arenas that exceeded both those of their male relatives and their male Shiv Sena colleagues. This flexibility underlies the success of the malkin. She is embedded in a social milieu that connects her to conventionally patriarchal structures (family, party). However, she has the capacity to channel these resources independently and outside the male gaze. Both Durva and Kalpana were invoked by junior women in the party and by male and female constituents as inspirational examples of what public women can be. However, both also conducted their aggressive and transactional styles of no-nonsense politics to encourage a wider and wider range of ordinary people (men and women) to participate in and make demands on the political process.
DURVA: THE POLITICS OF “NETWORK, NOT PAPERWORK”
I had been in the western Indian city of Pune for several months preparing for an electoral campaign for Pune's civic body with Durva. Fifty-two-year-old Durva was a prominent, nominated leader in the Shiv Sena. Durva did not run for elections herself. She preferred to use her local influence to help others in the party, particularly women, to get elected to the urban civic body and to surrounding district- and village-level assemblies. She lived in Budhvar Peth (Wednesday market), in the center of Pune's largest red-light district. Since she had extensive training in Ayurvedic medicine, she called herself doctor. In addition to her political work for Shiv Sena, she ran an organization that assisted sex workers in the area with health and legal matters. She was the president and only staff member of this organization. However, when matters related to what she called “my NGO,” required altercations with law-enforcement or civic bodies, she regularly recruited other Shiv Sena women to organize collective protests on behalf of the organization. As a result, many Shiv Sena women talked about themselves as “members of the sanstha (organization).” Membership was particularly invoked when jockeying for nominated posts that the party regularly hands out to grassroots foot-soldiers who are identified as important for elections.
Outside the building that is both Durva's office and home is a large board. One side of the board has Shiv Sena's logo of a fierce, roaring tiger and a head-shot of the party's founder, the late Bal Thackeray topped with a halo-like crown of diffused color. On the other side is a bigger picture of Durva, more ambiguously haloed, with hands raised between a blessing and a wave. Large lettering proclaims, “Durva Yadav; Shiv Sena Pramukh; President Akhil Budhvar Peth Devdasi Sanstha” (Shiv Sena Chief; President All Budhvar Peth Devdasi Organization).Footnote 8 These roles of NGO worker/counselor/caretaker/political party chief (pramukh) intersect visually on this board; in practice they intersected in almost all interactions Durva had. For the police who patrol the brothels, both as agents of the state and of desire, for senior Shiv Sena leaders who build their electoral strength through locally influential brokers, for shopkeepers, brothel owners, landlords and citizens, and for younger Shiv Sena women aspiring to be noticed for electoral tickets and party posts, Durva is called “our pramukh (chief).”
During this election season I followed Durva and her junior party workers as they climbed in and out of precarious rickshaws and rickety buses, stormed up and down steps of makeshift stages, and walked several kilometers on cracked pavements in the heavy monsoons. All the way Durva talked to, comforted, and listened to people. She gave formal speeches at events endorsing Shiv Sena women who were electoral candidates. At many events she and other Shiv Sena women who traveled with us were welcomed with garlands. At others, when addressing mainly female constituents she was welcomed with the Maharashtrian ritual, haldi-kumkum. This is where women apply turmeric (haldi) and vermillion (kumkum) powders to the foreheads of married female visitors to cement kinship and social obligations and reciprocity (Bedi Reference Bedi2007; Glushkova and Vora Reference Glushkova and Vora1999). This domesticated performance of obligation must be taken seriously in explorations of lower-level women politicians’ engagement with formal politics in India. While not a candidate herself, Durva was seen as the face of the party and the one whose endorsement was necessary for Shiv Sena candidates who were on the electoral rolls. Meetings and party events continued into the early hours of the morning. It was rare for Durva (or me) to sleep more than four hours a night; constituents and junior party workers routinely arrived at sunrise to catch Durva's ear before she left for her next destination.
Fatigue from this frenzied travel crept up on me a week into the campaign. Durva was indefatigable and showed no signs of slowing down. Just as I became worried that I might have to excuse myself from these long, frenzied days, she read through the visitor's log she keeps outside her office. Durva decided that she had missed too many visitors and that she would spend the next day or two close to home. Also, she said it would be good for her to “rest her feet.” On this first afternoon of rest, I was in her office, a cool, cavernous room on the first floor of her wada-style home. The wada is a form of multifamily dwelling found across Maharashtra. It draws spatial norms from the Hindu treatise of architecture, the Vastushastra, and is believed to have roots in the Vedic period (Dengle Reference Dengle, Glushkova and Feldhaus1998). The most significant feature of the wada structure is that it has outer rooms for meetings with outsiders. These were historically reserved for influential big men to hold political and social gatherings. However, Shiv Sena women who lived in wadas used them for party business. Durva used this space to meet with constituents, to provide health examinations, and counsel to sex workers—and to admonish their errant clients. The privacy of the inner rooms was where her husband and daughter watched television or did homework undisturbed (Bedi Reference Bedi, Leonard, Reddy and Gold2010).
A heavy, late monsoon rain bashed against the windows of the wada, and water snaked through the cracks and across the floor. Rolls of cloth were wedged under the window sills to catch what they could. Durva stood at the leaky window overlooking a cluster of dilapidated brothels and one of the busiest alleys in the area. She waved at several women sitting on their doorsteps.
“Sudha, make sure you get the correct rate beta (my child); if he doesn't give, shout to me, I will give him two tight slaps and call the police.” The woman she addressed looked up at her, smiled, and bowed her head: “Yes tai (older sister), I have your blessing and safety, he will have to give [good rate]. How will he not when we have you to protect us?”
To another young woman sitting too close to her window sill she shouted, “Oh, Meera, what have I told you? No business is worth your life; sit back, or you will fall out.”
Meera looked up and replied back with good humor, “I have no worry even if I fall out. I know that you are there to watch over us. You are the malkin (landlady), the mother of all of us in Budhvar Peth.”
The owner of a well-known sari shop in the city dropped in to visit her. Durva offered him a glass of water. He accepted the steel glass, bowed his head, and said, “Tai Footnote 9 , I am grateful that I get to drink the waterFootnote 10 in your house.” Durva smiled and raised her hand as if in blessing. After small talk about the traffic and heavy monsoons, the man implored that it had been too long since Durva had visited the sari shop; she must come, because there were “new items” she would like. He turned to me, “All my success in my business is because of god and because of Durvatai. In my shop I get heroines, like Hema Malini and RekhaFootnote 11 ; they all come to Poona to buy their saris from me. But really, it is Durvatai who is most valuable to me. It is her blessing that makes my business successful. She is the real malkin of the shop, not me. In all of Pune she is the real malkin.” Durva smiled in response to this invocation of herself as all-powerful landlady and responded, “Don't forget that I am here at election time. Don't forget the party.”
The shopkeeper nodded in agreement, joined his hands in a respectful namaste gesture and then slipped a piece of paper onto Durva's desk. He needed her signature for a petition he was submitting to the civic body to expand his shop into neighboring land. Durva signed the letter vigorously. She looked up and said,
Forget this formal letter jhanjhat (trouble). Just tell them you know me—use my name Durva and Shiv Sena's name, the work will be done, I know it! I can get things done through people, through the police, and through the government. What is important is how close you are to the people. You say I am the malkin, but I am never far away like the politicians, I am always with the people.
It is the network, not the paperwork that matters. If you want to do something you should not do any paperwork … just do the job.”
Rich work in political science and political anthropology has provided analytical lenses through which to look at transactional politics of the political fixer: patrons, clients, brokers, and big men have all been presented as examples of authority that in Durva's words “just do the job” (Kitschelt and Wilkinson Reference Kitschelt and Wilkinson2006; Paine Reference Paine and Paine1971; Scott and Kerkvliet Reference Scott, Kerkvliet, Schmidt, Guasti, Landé and Scott1977). The connection, even paradox, of the populist “close to the people” position and the class/gendered position of the malkin, the landlady, is important to problematize here. Durva is not a landlady because she has direct access to land or money. Undoubtedly, she is privileged both in terms of class and caste relative to the constituents she serves and to other Shiv Sena women (and men) who call on her networks. However, she commands authority as a malkin because others depend on her to access the murky political grids that run through and around the lowest levels of the Indian state (Anjaria Reference Anjaria2011). In other contexts, the term malkin and its associations with control over land and labor has feudal connotations of class privilege. In the case of Shiv Sena women it is closely tied to the female political boss and political caretaker. Both female political bosses like Durva, and younger, political upstarts use what they perceive to be significant capital from their party membership to accumulate independent resources of power. On the one hand this is acquired through feminized strategies of care, social work, and close, personal involvement in people's lives. On the other, it is achieved through local grids of aggressive visibility, performative violence, and practices of caretaking and patrol. These cultivate charismatic personas that teeter on the margins of criminality and extralegality. In this sense there is something about the person(a) of the malkin that makes her different. For example, Durva frequently alluded to the loud voice that she was so proud of and to her contempt for the formal law-enforcement arms of the state:
It is because my voice is loud that I have been made Shiv Sena Pramukh (chief). If I soften my voice, they will get rid of me from this post. I must have a loud voice, because I am the voice of many people. Do I care about the police? We have lots of cases on us. We have gone in [into jail] so many times and come out. We go in the morning and come home in the evening. We have gone to jail, just sat around and come back. In the name of Shiv Sena we do anything—anything meaning whatever is good.
The cases Durva refers to are criminal lawsuits filed against Shiv Sena party workers for participation in public protests or for vandalism of property that the party regularly engages in to claim public and political space (Hansen Reference Hansen2001; Heuze Reference Heuze, Patel and Thorner1995). Given the inefficiencies of the Indian court system these cases drag on for years during which time the defendants have to show up at court at regular intervals. For most Sena women, the number of cases against them is a badge of honor. That they drag on is advantageous. Delays allow the number of cases to accrue over time, which in turn allows women to see themselves as dangerous, and wanted by a number of courts.
Therefore, the malkin's politics is not always practiced according to the liberal and rational politics of the law. Nor is it always practiced in peaceful, nonviolent ways. The political grids that lie at the malkin's disposal are illicit and disarticulated networks of the democratic, postcolonial state. These loosely rely on formal institutions but mostly function outside the normative nature of the law and often engage with public violence and aggression (Anjaria Reference Anjaria2011; Chatterjee Reference Chatterjee2011; Hansen and Stepputat Reference Hansen and Stepputat2001; Painter Reference Painter2006). The malkin operates, as Durva states, through the network, not paperwork. Men in political parties also function through these networks (Hansen and Verkaaik Reference Hansen and Verkaaik2009); but at the lowest levels of the political party, women are integral to these networks for both male and female constituents. This is because they are seen as closest to everyday things in neglected urban environments and access connections to services and resources using strategies to build trust and dependence in ways that that men do not (Auyero Reference Auyero2003, Singerman Reference Singerman, Eickelman and Piscatori1995, Weinstein and Bedi Reference Weinstein, Bedi, Dasgupta, Driskell, Braun and Yeates2012).
KALPANA SATE: THE MALKIN, THE EVERYDAY STATE, AND PUBLIC “AUTHORSHIP” IN MUMBAI
Kalpana Sate was an elected member of Mumbai's civic body. In Mumbai, municipal councilors of the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (Municipal Corporation of Greater Mumbai) are called “corporators.”Footnote 12 She also qualified for electoral reservations based on caste since she identified as an OBC (Other Backward Classes).Footnote 13 Sate was known as Sate bai,Footnote 14 Sate madam, or simply madam.Footnote 15 During her reign as municipal councilor, if you needed her, all you had to do was go to the local market and ask where madam lived and someone pointed to her home. However, if you paid a visit before eleven at night, you would never find her home. “You can reach madam on her mobile,” was the response from her husband who was always home to answer the door or phone. Madam, like many politicians in India had two mobile phones. Everyone in the area seemed to have at least one, if not both numbers. A complaint or request on one line was fast resolved through a phone call to someone in the network from the other. Generally, madam's efforts to get things done were accompanied by loud threats to the person on the other end. She rarely bothered with formal petitions or paperwork; it was her mobile phone that got things done. This was the case whether it was to engage a plumber to build a water pipe to direct water into an underserved slum community, or to command an ambulance where no ambulance agreed to go.
Sate, now in her early fifties, comes from a low-caste, agricultural family in the coastal Konkan region. She migrated to Bombay after she married a man who was a foreman in Bombay's textile mills, which had until the late 20th century been the backbone of the city's economy (D'Monte Reference D'Monte2005 [2002]; Menon and Adarkar Reference Menon and Adarkar2004). By the time I met her in 2003, she had already contested three election campaigns under the OBC/women's electoral reservation ticket, two of which she won. Before this, she was a dedicated foot-soldier for the party for 18 years. She had been noticed early in her career by Sudha Churi, the former Mahila Aghadi chief who lived in the same area. Through Churi's endorsements and nominations, Sate served the party in a variety of nominated positions. Through these low-level nominated posts, she had built the visibility and networks that made her one of the most formidable leaders in the area. She was therefore handpicked by Shiv Sena to contest an election in Mumbai's northwest suburbs in a ward reserved for OBC women.
In the years that I spent with Sate I witnessed how she closely cultivated what she referred to as image. This image fluctuated between fierce, public aggression and benevolent, though always visible, caretaking. When her husband lost his job in the late 1980s, in order to supplement the family income Kalpana trained to become a balwadi (early childhood center) teacher. Balwadis focus their efforts at helping children in working-class neighborhoods, who often hail from families of low education and literacy, get early preparation for school. Their purported mission of uplift means they are often partially funded by local and international NGOs. Generally, balwadis are run out of the home of a woman who has received a license and training in balwadi teaching and who brings in other women from her neighborhood to help out. In India, as in much of South Asia, grassroots NGOs are rarely independent of the influence of political parties. It is common for political parties to recruit women candidates from among balwadi teachers in poor communities. In both Mumbai and Pune many of the most visible Shiv Sena women had started their “public” careers as balwadi teachers. The close, personal interactions they have with poor families cement trust, which is called on regularly during elections and after. In Sate's words,
[Through my balwadi], I have an old relationship with people. They do not think of me as the Corporator. They know that I will come for any problem they have. That is the relationship I have. I do not behave with them as a Corporator. I am like a sister, a mother, a daughter to people here. After I leave this seat (of formal power), I am going to have to sit on the floor, so I like to stay with the people.
This association of women with childcare and childrearing programs certainly reinforces feminine positions as caregivers. However, at the same time the overlap in social circumstances between Shiv Sena women and their constituents allows many to gain personal access to people's lives and problems.
Further, those who have balwadi licenses hire and train other women, who in turn become campaigners for those selected as political candidates. Sate continued to be surrounded by women who began as helpers in her balwadi. They had, along the way, been recruited into Shiv Sena as supporters and campaigners. Many of these women had also been beneficiaries of madam's largesse that came with her expanded political networks and her access to senior party leaders, bureaucratic arms of the civic body, and the police. Mostly these were material favors like illicit permits for a small businesses or building permits for additions to slum housing; but in many cases they were nominations to appointed posts within the party allowing different women to gain access and channel resources elsewhere on their own.
Sate was always negotiating loudly with someone on her mobile phone, was quick to smack shopkeepers or auto rickshaw drivers who charged her too much and was always among the first at Shiv Sena morchas (protests), riots, or demonstrations. The imperatives of self-promotion in the transient halls of power she was in had become so much a part of her. Almost no conversation she had with anyone was complete without reminding them of her good works in the neighborhood. I came to realize that this self-promotion was a thinly veiled form of self-affirmation and stemmed from a poignant desire to leave behind a civic legacy in the municipal wards under her jurisdiction.
One evening at the local party office she turned to one of the young Shiv Sena men present and asked him whether he had seen the terrific nalla (drain and sewage system) that she had commissioned in her ward. He said, “Yes madam, it is a mast (wonderful) nalla. You are the malkin of the area.” She got a far-off, misty look in her eyes and responded in wonderment—“Really?” The dozen or so younger male Shiv Sainiks at the party office said in loud unison, “Yes, madam you are the malkin; without your word, nothing happens.”
A Muslim man, Bashir, sat down to talk to her about water shortages. She said, “Bashir, I do all this work for you, but you better get your people (Muslims) to come over to our side. I want to see Shiv Sena flags in all your homes.” Bashir, strategic in his support for her, responded, “Madam, I have come many times to get flags, or at least a board with the party name and your name.” Bashir then assured her that for the next election he would get, “forty-five or fifty Muslims” from his area to vote for Shiv Sena. Then he slipped in a request to mend a broken toilet in the public bathroom in his settlement. Madam, satisfied with Bashir's promise of political support, immediately got on her cell phone with one of the many civic contractors that she worked with and yelled into the telephone:
I am standing right here in ward 30. I have just seen that the toilet in this ward number 30 is broken. I want you to fix it by tomorrow. And while you are about it, go ahead and put in two benches outside with my name engraved on them so that they know who did the work … immediately … Jai (hail) Maharashtra … bye-bye.
She then turned to the others sitting around the office and said loudly, “If I don't use my network, then nothing will get done; but if I do the work, then people need to see who is doing the work.” Everyone nodded in agreement once again: “Yes, madam, you are the malkin of this area and you should show your work.”
Indeed, over the course of my fieldwork I counted a full six benches with plaques embellished with Sate's name. Two of these were outside public bathrooms in poor settlements; one was outside a small, neighborhood temple; two were in a new local park for children; and two in a local market. The new one commissioned for Bashir's settlement that evening may well have been the last of her tenure. Only four months later, Sate's electoral ward was reorganized from a women's reserved ward to a general ward, and a furious Sate had to give up her electoral ticket to a male Shiv Sena candidate for the 2007 municipal elections.
POLITICAL MATRONAGE: STRADDLING FORMAL AND INFORMAL POLITICS
Indeed, a discussion of matronage politics as a distinct political category could easily fall into essentializing women's politics. Arguments that women are naturally more caring than men or that they have a higher moral sense and are less corrupt are quite common (D'Amico Reference D'Amico, D'Amico and Beckman1995; Dollar, Fisman, and Gatti Reference Dollar, Fisman and Gatti1999; Mies and Shiva Reference Mies and Shiva1993). However, this discussion of the malkin as an expression of matronage is less concerned with delineating differences between men and women leaders and more with what these perceived differences have on the relationships between leaders and followers—between malkins and those who depend on them (Spary Reference Spary2007). Further, women like Durva and Kalpana deliberately utilize domesticated strategies of care and nurture in their politics, thereby conforming to gendered expectations in return for electoral and other forms power. On the other hand, they are seen by constituents as vital to political networks. They see themselves and are widely accepted as part of the making of grids of political obligation that sustain the political party. For Shiv Sena women, these grids are critical in promoting the capacity of poor and marginalized urban residents to gain access to various material and instrumental resources through political malkins. These women become forces to contend with because they are relatively more conversant with state practices, are embedded in the everyday life of the community, are known and trusted by many, and behave both as the face of the state and as its adversary. They produce authority precisely because their aggressive movement in public space makes them exceptional women. They continue to function within a political party that is dominated by networks of patronage between men. However, malkins at the lower levels of the party renegotiate the gendered nature of the public and political sphere through the charismatic and extralegal “politics of presence” (Hansen Reference Hansen2001; Phillips Reference Phillips1995). Shiv Sena women like Durva and Kalpana are malkins because they cultivate personas that are closer to what Rhonda Halperin, drawing from Eric Hobsbawm, calls social banditry (Halperin Reference Halperin1999; Hobsbawm Reference Hobsbawm1959). Hobsbawm's social bandits are rural actors who share two important characteristics: they are male and youthful. However, Halperin's social bandits in poor parts of urban America are women who through this banditry threaten the urban, male, power structure (Halperin Reference Halperin1998). Durva and Kalpana, like many other Shiv Sena women are seen as “exceptional” women precisely because they do not always follow the rules and because they utilize strategies that are seen as unusual in the social milieus that they function in. While they are protected by their political party, they often exceed the power of the party itself largely because they have been able to cultivate a wide variety of networks that allow them to call on and channel resources in various directions across the political system. The senior (male) party leaders recognize that their own power relies on these trusted brokers, and therefore they continue to provide them with protection. Therefore, women like Durva and Kalpana in their capacity as recipients of patronage and purveyors of matronage have become vital nodes in the networks of political obligation that undergird the formal domains of electoral politics.
Let us return to this invocation of the network by both Durva and Kalpana. While Durva had been an appointed leader in the women's wing of the party in Pune for almost 12 years, she had never contested an election, nor did she have any formal position from which to sign a petition directed at the state. However, when I followed the afterlife of the petition to Pune's municipal corporation, none of the low-level bureaucrats flinched at the fact that the shop owner had her signature. All that mattered was that it (the petition) and the shopkeeper were marked as protected by Durva—the malkin. While Durva was a self-appointed authority, this authority was well accepted within the environments in which she functioned. Everyone simply assumed that she had legitimate authority (Hansen and Stepputat Reference Hansen and Stepputat2001; Weber Reference Weber1968). In fact, in a political context where the cynicism over a filthy and corrupt political system is rampant, Durva's status as a nonelected, but locally influential leader elevated her authority even more (Robertson Reference Robertson2007; Gupta Reference Gupta1995). Further, the term malkin was invoked regularly to describe Durva by those who pushed paper in the administrative offices of the city government. Her signature and her name were well known among them and was widely accepted as an official stamp of approval in pushing paper and the politics surrounding it forward (Gupta Reference Gupta2012; Hull Reference Hull2012).
Kalpana produced her authority through cross-cutting relationships of formal, elected power and informal relationships with others who depend on her and on whom she herself depends—what James Scott has referred to as infrapolitics (Anand Reference Anand2011; Scott Reference Scott1990). She had entered the political arena as an important social broker in her locality and had been hand-picked by her party to run for a reserved electoral seat. In turn she was able to mobilize others who depend on her to support her continued visibility. The need to commemorate the work she does as a representative of the state so it is visible is closely tied to her dependence on others, such as contractors, plumbers, and builders who help her control this public authorship and representation. It is only if the work is visible that her matronage and caretaking can be truly realized. In one of the few serious discussions of women's “patronage,” Ruggles (Reference Ruggles2000b) examines women's representation of themselves through art, architecture, and literature in the Muslim world. We are encouraged to consider how the notions of authorship and who controls representation are significant in discussions of patronage and are crucial to the visible domains of a patron's authority (Ruggles Reference Ruggles and Ruggles2000a). Distinctions between visibility and invisibility are vital. Charitable acts such as endowing a mosque with funds to feed the poor are invisible, while the visible act is the building itself (Ruggles Reference Ruggles and Ruggles2000a, 5); the building, for female patrons of architecture, stands in for a public profile often denied to the woman herself. For Kalpana, construction of a bench with her name on it commemorates the work she does, and it lasts long after her tenure in formal office. Similarly for Durva, despite avowed aversion to paperwork, the circulation of a signature, that everyday stamp of personal authority, creates a visible register of her presence.
CONCLUSIONS
In this article I have attempted to shift the discussion of political authority and political networks from conventionally male gendered approaches to focus on the grids and networks where women act as the focus of support for political constituents. Through an ethnographic, contextual exploration of the activities of low-level women politicians in India, often referred to as malkins, I explore the figure and practice of the malkin as an example of political matronage. I suggest that matronage within contemporary politics in the postcolonial world needs to be looked at as its own political category of material and symbolic authority. While I explore political matronage within the context of formal electoral reservations, I illustrate how electoral and party politics opens up new spaces for transactional politics as women become and are widely seen as critical to sustaining the influence of political parties. The regulatory context of the Women's Reservation Bill has affected the ways in which women like Durva and Kalpana see themselves and channel their political capital up and down the political party system. As the ethnographic data illustrate, at the urban and peri-urban levels of India's electorate, problems of displacement, lack of access, and urban degradation are most rampant. This is where party workers like Durva and Kalpana function best as caretakers, as malkins, through their close connections to senior party leaders as well as to other arms of the formal state—the network. By focusing on located political practices and on the networks and channels of matronage, I attempt to expand the focus of postcolonial, feminist political studies. I suggest that rather than simply focusing on debates over empowerment and emancipation it is vital to encompass the realities of how female political figures actually “practice” their political lives to create political authority and political networks on the ground.
By suggesting that political channels animated by Shiv Sena women are expressions of matronage, this article seeks to expand the analytical categories available to explore the seemingly chaotic dynamics of political life in modern India. Undoubtedly, there are varied and often inconsistent “styles” through which political parties and different political actors engage with the political process. The networks that they produce and who drives these shifting networks are both ethnographically and analytically complicated. Therefore, while I acknowledge that Shiv Sena women's political efficacy and matronage is often embedded in existing networks of what might be seen as male-dominated patronage, this is not always the case. Nor are there clearly consistent ways in which women at different levels of the party or those located in different social and physical spaces engage with the political process. Instead, as different women see various formal possibilities for electoral access through political parties, they garner a variety of matronage networks that mark political possibility and political obligations. These networks operate between women at different positions within the party and between women and expanding constituencies. They are also essential for the upper-level male, party leadership to sustain their own power. Matronage therefore is the capacity of women to channel symbolic, material, and emotive resources, up, down, and across the political process.
Shiv Sena men also engage in this kind of extralegal, charismatic, and aggressive politics (Hansen Reference Hansen2001). However, for women the perceived transgression of gender norms and gendered spaces marks them for their constituents as “exceptional” women or what Hobsbawm (Reference Hobsbawm1998) calls “ordinary uncommon people.” Therefore, the malkin is an all-encompassing and embedded category of political matronage and authority. Furthermore, because the malkin's power rests on informal, personal relationships—the network—her power periodically exceeds both the domain of formal electoral politics as well as the reach of men in the party.
It is at the lower levels of the political party, that the network and the relationships of local authority and matronage are most pronounced and must be constantly reproduced. These are the levels of the party where privilege and the dynastic political capital most commonly associated with women in South Asian politics begin to fragment (Chowdhury Reference Chowdhury2008). It is the political space where relationships of authority are less dyadic or ascribed than they are shifting and are charismatically produced. Undoubtedly, party affiliation significantly shapes women's political participation; however, women like Durva and Kalpana are key nodes in these connections and are widely seen as such. They are not simply recipients of patronage but actively shape the nature of this patrimonial access through shaping the formation of constituencies in marginal places through intrepid strategies of local matronage.
