“Towards Equality,” the 1974 report of the Committee on the Status of Women commissioned by the Indian government—now regarded by Indian feminists as a landmark document—revealed the postcolonial Indian state's dismal record in protecting women's health, education, and political rights. In the wake of this report, scholars intensified their investigation of the relationship between women's lives and the developmental strategies followed by the postcolonial state in India. Consequently, a plethora of “Women in Development” literature in the tradition of Maria Mies's (1982) Lace Makers of Narsapur argued that capitalism and mechanization, fused with patriarchy and caste hierarchy, have actually decreased the status of women in India. Falling sex ratios (the number of women per thousand men fell from 954 in 1971 to 927 in 1997)—the most dramatic evidence of this decline—illustrated that, in some cases, the impact of modernization on Indian women has literally led to death. The two books under review fall into this genre of critical feminist literature.

Women's lived experiences form the analytic focus of both these volumes. The series of essays edited by Karin Kapadia challenge neoliberal assumptions that economic growth has actually created better lives for a majority of women in India, while Rajeswari Sunder Rajan argues that Indian democracy has failed to provide a welfare net for women and enforce its constitutional promise to protect their rights of citizenship.

The general argument underlying the essays in The Violence of Development is rather alarming: “[O]ne of the major findings to emerge from these papers is that in recent decades there has been a strengthening of male-biased (‘patriarchal’) norms and values across all castes and classes in India, simultaneously with increasing economic development” (p. 4). In the interest of brevity, this review will draw on two of the more provocative themes framing the essays: the danger of capitalist modernization and the futility of women's political participation.

The authors draw on a wealth of empirical and ethnographic data—one of the major contributions of this volume—to reveal the myriad ways in which modernization has decreased the quality of many Indian women's lives. While a bit more theorizing about the social construction of “woman” in the Indian context might have enhanced the arguments, this is a minor drawback, as the reader appreciates the authors' refreshing and well-supported empirical challenges to many of the unquestioned claims advanced by policymakers in their enthusiastic quest to liberalize economies and rely on macroindicators for signs of progress. The oft-repeated truism that economic growth leads to some kind of female empowerment, which in turn leads to declining fertility rates, is cleverly challenged by Padmini Swaminathan. Conventional modernization arguments claim that gender-neutral capitalism will increase women's education and employment opportunities, thus enabling women to demand rights to control their pregnancies. Consequently, high female labor participation and low fertility rates are read as signs of a rise in female status. Swaminathan's detailed analysis of women in rural Tamil Nadu complicate the above truism. She finds that the least-educated and most-disadvantaged women have lower (for various cultural reasons) fertility rates than women with more economic advantages. Further, the increases in female employment tracked in Tamil Nadu are mostly in low-paying informal sector jobs. Indeed, adolescent girls are being removed from school to earn, while their brothers remain to receive a higher education. Nirmala Banerjee's well-argued piece on the link between economic growth and consumerism and violence against women shores up Swaminathan's points.

According to Banerjee, even families in which women are well educated and professional have not moved beyond the notion that women's primary social roles are wife and mother. She does not extensively illustrate the exact manner in which these roles hinder an educated woman, and here some reliance on the extensive existing body of theorizing on the social construction of “woman” in the Indian context would enhance her argument. For example, she could have posed the following questions: How do professional, middle-class women—it is important to remember that lower-caste/class women have always worked outside the home—challenge elite Indian ideals of womanhood? What implications does this have for women's lives? How do women negotiate between tradition and challenge? Banerjee's most chilling argument is the link among consumerism, dowry, and female infanticide. Challenging conventional arguments that cite poverty and restrictive cultural norms as explanatory causes, she shows that it is not the desperately poor but the upwardly mobile who kill their girl children, and “these decisions are now being made by individual families purely on the basis of private calculations of cost and benefits; there is no pressure of community traditions” (p. 47). Karin Kapadia's essay supports Banerjee's claims as she traces the manner in which dowries brought by brides are seen as a quick and easy way to either buy consumer goods or receive venture capital in a rapidly globalizing India.

Female political participation may form a potent way of resisting the above economic contradictions, and the four articles by Revathi Narayanan, Seemanthini Niranjana, Shail Mayaram, and Anandhi S. examine this topic. Their work can be situated in a well-known arena of feminist theorizing (although the authors do not draw extensively on this literature): the tension between feminine and feminist political representation. Put another way, feminist work has extensively debated the fact that electing women to legislative assemblies does not necessarily mean a collective increase in women's status and empowerment, unless the sociocultural context supports such social change. The authors intersect this debate with their individual analyses of women and rural electoral politics in South India.

In 1992 and 1993, constitutional amendments strengthened local government councils (or panchayats) at the village level and created quotas for women's participation, not only as general councillors but also as council presidents and vice presidents. This did indeed increase the percentage of women councillors and council presidents/vice presidents, but most of these women had very little power to actually change existing gender and caste power structures. All four authors relate this failure to the cultural power of male and caste dominance. The remaining articles by Kalpana Sharma, Urvashi Butalia, Nisha Srivastava, and Samita Sen continue the theme of resistance as they describe women's attempts both collectively—through the Indian women's movements—and individually to fight violence and gender discrimination.

In The Scandal of the State, Rajan continues the political conversation about women's lives begun by the Kapadia volume through her analysis of the relationship between Indian women and the state. Using a series of well-analyzed case studies, Rajan exposes the Indian state's inadequate commitment to protecting women's rights. She focuses on the battle over a Muslim child bride, sterilization of mentally retarded women in state institutions, female infanticide in Tamil Nadu, prostitution, the position of women in the debate over a uniform civil code, and the surrender of the female outlaw, Phoolan Devi, (she of Bandit Queen fame). Through a sophisticated discourse analysis revealing both a good knowledge of feminist and South Asian studies theorizing on state, the author adds political texture to the Kapadia volume by underlining the Indian state's reluctance to undertake a clear-cut and self-conscious program to enhance women's political/social rights.

On finishing these volumes, one is tempted to demand a plan of action aimed at ameliorating the lives of women in India. But such a demand raises further questions: Whose plan? Who is being represented? Who leads? Who speaks? How does one measure success? As Rajan's richly textured case studies reveal, multiple factors (e.g., social markers, such as caste, class, religion, language, ethnicity, sexualities) inter-twine to construct ideas of womanhood and feminist political participation, making a systemic plan of reform fraught with the danger of silencing some women and furthering the agenda of groups who may not prioritize women's rights. For example, as Rajan argues, feminist organizing against the kid-napping of Ameena, the Muslim child bride, strengthened (unintentionally) the conservative Hindu nationalist belief in the “backwardness” of the Muslim community and its links to insidious “outsiders” (Ameena's parents had sold her to a Saudi Arabian man), without offering any solution for Ameena (who was forced to return to her family and, one suspects, sold again) and girls in her situation. Feminist organizing also did not really increase public awareness and/or acceptance of the structural gender oppression shaping Ameena's lot. Finally, Ameena and her mother were silent spectators as their lives were exposed under the gaze of the media and society.

The Kapadia and Rajan volumes—appropriate for advanced undergraduate and graduate classes as well as the specialist in Indian politics—add rich case studies to the well-established field of feminist postcolonial theory informed by critiques of economic and political modernity, paving the way for future works to imagine effective feminist resistance.