Paid Work, Politics and the Altruistic Feminine

In traditional Malayalee society, family spaces were named by caste and constructed through caste practices and gender norms. For instance, the Brahmin home was referred to as ‘Illam’ or ‘Mana’; the Nair homestead as ‘Taravadu’ or ‘Idam’; the homes of temple-castes such as Warriers or Pisharady, as ‘Waryam’ or ‘Sharam’ and that of lower castes as ‘Kudi’ or ‘Chaala’. In other words, a generalized notion of domestic space housing the family was absent. To a large extent spatial norms regulated the movement of upper-caste women. The confinement of Brahmin women to the ‘inner’, expressed through terms like ‘antarjanam’ (literally, ‘inner folk’, referring to Malayala Brahmin women) was carried over into the regulation of their movement outside, through such sartorial requirements as the large ‘veil umbrella’ (marakkuda) and the ‘cotton veil’ (putappu), and the presence of servants, male and female, when they went out.Footnote ¹¹ Women in aristocratic Nair homes, too, were subject to spatial regulation, for instance, in the injunction that even the eldest woman should speak to the karanavar (the male head of the household) only from behind the door. Indeed, the observance of spatial regulations was often taken to be crucial in shaping feminine moral qualities found characteristically amongst the aristocracy—and hardly vice versa.

The new woman—the grhini—idealized in new early twentieth-century new elite reformisms, was linked to the grham.Footnote ¹² The grham differed from the above-mentioned family spaces and public spaces such as the chantha. It was (a) unconnected to specific communities (as was the Illam or the taravad), and primarily the handiwork of the ideal woman; and (b) it primarily referred to a set of intimate altruistic social ties. While the new grhini was frequently advised on how to rearrange space in the home, these arrangements had to remain strictly subservient to the fostering of altruistic family ties. Following from (a), the ideal grham would constitute a set of family ties, which could be set up well outside caste structures, norms and spatial regulations. Following from (b) it had to be animated by the ‘gentle’, non-coercive power of subjectification. The ideal woman, it was claimed, was marked by her ability to exercise such power effectively, to manage materials and souls within the household.Footnote ¹³ The predominance of the task of maintaining altruistic family ties in the grham ensured that its material space could be imagined in multiple ways.

However, it appeared in the course of the twentieth century that increasingly modern-educated, new elite women were venturing into paid work.Footnote ¹⁴ Economic and social change around these times seems to have been crucial in accelerating this trend. The Great Depression and changing agrarian relations and legislation abolishing the impartibility of joint family properties exacerbated the difficulties for land-owning families.Footnote ¹⁵ The onset of the first phase of the demographic transition in Travancore and Cochin in the 1920s meant that families had higher burdens to bear. Changing marriage practices—and the dowry practices among matrilineal groupsFootnote ¹⁶—were another emergent pressure. At the same time, the governments of Travancore and Cochin were actively encouraging girls’ schooling and their enrolment was steadily rising.Footnote ¹⁷ Jointly, these pressures could have induced women, especially of groups which traditionally allowed girls literacy, and in which women's economic contribution was not always frowned upon, to enter the labour market.

This shift was not smooth. Women entered employment often on unfavourable terms. The history of Malayalee women's entry into paid work in the early twentieth century is replete with attempts to restrict entry to married women on the grounds that married women's loyalties are divided.Footnote ¹⁸ Second, many argued that women should not be permitted to do ‘unfeminine’ work, such as policing, or liquor selling.Footnote ¹⁹ Whilst there were hints that women who chose employment were ‘mannish’, rejection of femininity was largely equated with moral decline—with greed, irresponsibility, sexual promiscuity and competitiveness. The rationalist feminist K. Saraswati Amma took these charges head-on through her short stories,Footnote ²⁰ reminding her readers of the double standards at work here: women who carry the burden of morality in an immoral world are digging their own graves. This, however, was an uncommon response. The more common rebuttal was to deny that modern women sought such pleasures.Footnote ²¹

The two major arguments forged by the first-generation feminists to meet the barrage of criticism against women's working and public selves took advantage of the conception of the modern home. The first was the claim that essential femininity was not so much associated with a specific space—the home—as with a form of power. Since such power was essential to all institutions of modern disciplining that shaped modern individuals, women's presence in all such spaces was more than justified. Thus, a woman could well realize her feminine potential without marriage or childbearing, simply as an agent of the ‘gentle power’ of shaping subjects in other disciplinary institutions—or in specific niches within institutions recognized as male spaces. The second argument linked women's work outside the home to their concern for the wellbeing of the family; thus when a woman sought paid work, it was mostly for the welfare and upward mobility of her family.

Not surprisingly, this latter argument proved far more popular. In the context of economic stagnation combined with rising consumption aspirations, several middle-class women participating in debates on women's work in later decades justified women's paid employment as a necessary contribution to the general family wellbeing, actually partly contributing it to the fulfillment of her housewifely altruistic responsibilities. A few demanded reciprocal concern from husbands, who were being helped by their wives.Footnote ²² ‘The foremost advantage from employment [of housewives] is that income increases,’ wrote an author, Annamma Joseph, in a women's column of the Malayala Manorama in 1969, ‘an increase in income means that their standard of living will go up. It is certain that the house will be happy and peaceful if there are no financial difficulties.’ Besides, the working woman's ‘mental culture’, the ‘development of her individuality’, and ‘experience in worldly matters’ make her a more desirable and understanding companion to the husband.Footnote ²³ At the same time, the tragic tale of the unmarried working woman used by her family, ultimately rejected by them, was repeatedly retold in literature and cinema. The desire to combine work and housewifery also seems evident in a survey conducted by the newspaper Malayala Manorama among women college students. The overwhelming majority wanted professional employment. Of the total sample, the largest share wanted to become doctors, citing ‘the desire to serve’ as the reason; others wished to become school teachers (22 per cent), college teachers (17 per cent), nurses (9 per cent), lawyers (6 per cent), engineers (4 per cent) and film stars (3 per cent). Only 5 per cent of the total sample reported the desire to be housewives. The survey also revealed an overwhelming preference for marriage, with 63 per cent preferring arranged marriages.Footnote ²⁴

But though these arguments gained immense circulation in the Malayalee public sphere through the later decades of the twentieth century, this does not mean that the grhini was unseated, nor did it mean that the social surveillance and spatial and temporal regulations upon working women ended. Indeed not, as present-day life in Kerala testifies.Footnote ²⁵ The strong gender segregation of public spaces in Kerala, frequently commented upon by visitors was, and is, one of the strongest forms of regulation upon the working woman.Footnote ²⁶ Nor did these arguments ease the caste-tinged stigma upon certain occupations—for instance, nursing. It has recently been remarked that migration is built into the choice of nursing as a profession in contemporary Kerala; this may be read as a strategy adopted earlier by women to escape the stigma.Footnote ²⁷ Also, practical issues of balancing the double burden reappear in public discussions throughout the twentieth century. Further, issues of the embodiment of women in public—their dressing, demeanour—were being raised in the 1950s. As Saraswati Amma pointed out, the widespread acceptance of the sari as the ‘decent dress’ of the middle-class, cultured, educated working woman seemed to be a hurdle in that it restricted their physical mobility hugely; the debate on ‘decent dress’ for women has been a continuous and bustling one throughout the 1990s.Footnote ²⁸ Moral evaluations continued to classify work as suitable or unsuitable for women. Thus, the working woman in Kerala did not really exist in contradiction with the ideal feminine; there were arguments available which could justify her movement away from the home, strictly in terms of feminine capacities and concerns. However, while working women were certainly more exposed to public life, there were clear regulatory mechanisms that prevented their integration as fully fledged citizens into the public and politics.

While a fuller history of the shifts in the spaces of labour of women of marginalized communities in Kerala is yet to be written, it appears that women of the lowest caste groups, largely excluded from education, moved from feudal labour to paid agricultural and industrial labour, and the anxieties over ‘loss of gender’ were of no relevance there, as they were always projected as outside full femininity. However, Anna Lindberg's detailed and careful account traces the gradual subsuming of working-class women under domestic ideologies through the 1950s and 1960s.Footnote ²⁹ The female work-participation rate fell steadily in Kerala throughout the twentieth century; no wonder then that recent efforts to draw below-poverty-line (BPL) women into income-generating activities have had to tread the ground of gender rather softly.

The movement into the public and politics, however, was more difficult to justify. The public was projected early as ‘male space’, but by the late 1920s, educated women were demanding entry, claiming to represent the group interests of ‘women’. Opposition was strong.Footnote ³⁰ Social work, however, was claimed as ‘women's space’, given its disciplinary nature. Gandhian ideology and its emphasis on feminine power worked heavily to justify women's entry into nationalist agitation. By the late 1930s many Congresswomen, active in anti-imperialist agitation, began to shift into Gandhian social work. Many (Akkamma Cheriyan, for instance) left public life in the 1950s, discouraged by the severely competitive party politics. Indeed, the lack of match was evident in an appeal published in the Malayala Manorama in 1938, exhorting women to join the anti-government ‘Abstention’ movement in Travancore.Footnote ³¹ The agitation was clearly an outcome of ‘divisive and redistributionist politics’, but women were invited to participate not as full members of the community but as domestic subjects, exerting their influence upon family members. The odds against women who demanded full presence in the political field were clearly high; the few women who stayed on often claimed distance from conjugal family life and procreation. Underwriting this was often the projection of oneself as a purely mind-centred subject, ostensibly devoid of bodily desire and need for family ties, whose re-productivity was in the public.Footnote ³²

In the immediate post-independence decades, demands for redistribution were framed within a notion of (male) citizenship and people's fundamental rights to land, health, education and a heavy emphasis placed on ‘public action’ that ultimately allowed a continuous expansion of welfare.Footnote ³³ In other words, politics in these times was not only ‘divisive’ and ‘competitive’ but also anchored on a discourse of ‘people's rights’, which had little place for feminine altruism that ‘healed’. For the few women who stayed in politics, a career there could not be connected in any way to the betterment of one's own family. Indeed, women in politics, being free of the obligation to be altruistic, were often quite forthright about their desire for power and upward mobility in the political field. In her autobiography, Annie Thayyil retells her bid for political upward mobility, and how she was outplayed by Leela Damodara Menon.Footnote ³⁴

The goals and methods towards political power varied for the Left and the non-Left in the 1950s. For the communists the route of dedicated mass mobilization and administrative skills was prescribed. On the non-Left, aspirants to political power had to be adept in building and breaking alliances, making decisions and choosing sides at opportune moments—in other words, respond shrewdly to ‘strategic opportunities’. Women politicians risked their gender when they aspired for either of these paths—but a few took up the challenge. In the Congress, Leela Damodara Menon is a good example. Active since the 1950s, she was one of the most successful women politicians in Kerala—she was a member of the Kerala State Assembly twice and of the Rajya Sabha once, and also the Indian representative at the United Nations. Her rise in Kerala's political scene was, as she herself put it, in the shadow of her husband, the powerful Congressman Damodara Menon. Through her political career, Leela switched political loyalties, and effectively steered herself to power, attaining prominence in the debates around the first communist ministry's education billFootnote ³⁵—and earned for herself in many quarters the name of a ruthless player, something reserved for male politicians. The charge of using ‘family connections’ applied well to her—and indeed, has been applied to almost all women on the non-Left who reached the upper-levels of politics in Kerala. This, however, was a way of affirming the ‘lack of morality’ of women in politics, a way of ‘un-gendering’ them. It may be necessary to note that women who were thus ‘un-gendered’ were not automatically recognized as ‘masculine’. Thus, Leela Damodara Menon, despite being highly successful, could never acquire the same public standing as that of K. R. Gauri Amma, the foremost woman communist politician in Kerala.

Gauri Amma emerged in and through the communist movement, as a successful woman leader who could play both the (equally masculine) roles of the political protestor outside the government, and of the decisive administrator inside. In the 1950s she publicly proclaimed that women did not really need 4 months of maternity leave, and that women should be appointed as bus-conductors, an exclusively male job.Footnote ³⁶ The entry into politics of the other prominent woman communist leader of these times, Susheela Gopalan, was heavily mediated by the presence of her husband, A. K. Gopalan. However, despite being cast widely in the role of the ‘comrade's wife’, she did not feel obliged to couch her political ambitions and aspirations in altruistic terms; her later fame rested entirely on her own work to further the agenda of communist mass mobilization.

Admittedly, this ‘honorary masculinity’ to which women politicians lay claim was a fragile one. It was not as if they never faced allegations of immorality—‘public womanhood’ was always a term that could be loaded with undesirable connotations of sexual excess. However, most women politicians of this generation stood up against such allegations, and did not always take recourse in gendered moral ideals; nor did they cite understanding husbands or families necessarily. Rather, they drew upon their claim to gender-neutral public identity to shield themselves against the sexual double norm. Confident in their status as public people, women politicians often rebutted the allegations they faced as inevitable ‘thorns’ in the path towards attaining political power. As Mary Thomas Alakappilli declared at the inauguration of the women's wing of the Congress in Muvattupuzha in 1954: ‘Those of us who ventured into organizational work were greeted with many bitter experiences. But we are still moving forward. We know well that political work is no bed of roses here.’Footnote ³⁷ Risking the social privilege accruing from adherence to the feminine gender, then, was a heroic act, a sacrifice, which allowed one to move ahead in politics.

In contrast, for men, politics was stable home ground. The debate whether the ideal Man was to be located in the modern public, the spaces of employment opened up within modern institutions, or in the space of capitalist production, beginning around the late nineteenth century, continued to be heard in the 1940s and 1950s. Indeed, the ideal masculine was frequently identified with the former two spaces, than with the latter, despite frequent appeals to young men to get involved in production. The history of the shifts in the notion of ‘politics’ in twentieth century Kerala—its several incarnations in sites ranging from debates in the nascent Malayalee public sphere of the late nineteenth century to the literary modernism of the 1960s—is yet to be written; however, there can be little doubt that this history would evoke as its not-so-invisible parallel, the history of mainstream masculine identity.

Feminine Altruism in the Public?

The 1990s saw important developments that have been widely interpreted to be extensions of these two forms of mobility. The 73rd and 74th Amendments to the Indian Constitution, which allowed 33 per cent representation for women in all three levels of the local self-governing institutions (LSGIs) including the leadership, were brought into force in the local bodies’ elections in Kerala in 1995.Footnote ³⁸ Second, women of the poorest sections of Malayalee society were organized into a state-wide self-help group network under the aegis of the State's poverty-alleviation ‘mission’, the Kudumbashree, which aimed to improve the economic wellbeing of families through women, directing them into micro-enterprises and thrift and credit activities.

The Kudumbashree is characterized as a ‘women-oriented’ poverty eradication programme, with women's empowerment as one of its major goals—one that is actively projected in the media. Kudumbashree places women from BPL households at the heart of the poverty eradication efforts of the state. It was begun in 1998 by the government of Kerala with the aim of eliminating poverty within 10 years. The present structure, however, began to evolve earlier, in 1991, when the Community-Based Nutrition Programme (CBNP) was initiated by the government of Kerala with active help from the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) to improve the nutritional status of women and children. The Kudumbashree is composed of Neighbourhood Groups (NHGs) which were federated into Area Development Societies at the ward level, which were in turn federated into a Community Development Society (CDS) at the municipal level. These were formed exclusively of women from families identified as ‘poor’ through a non-income-based index. The success of the CDS model in the two districts of Alappuzha and Malappuram led the government of Kerala to scale up the strategy to include the whole of the state in 1998 still under the Kudumbashree banner, with the State Poverty Eradication Mission taking responsibility for its implementation through the Department of Local Self-Government. The Kudumbashree has since followed a multi-pronged strategy which includes convergence of various government programmes and resources at the community-based organization, efforts to involve the CDS structure in local-level anti-poverty planning, and development of women's micro-enterprises and thrift and credit societies. Indeed, it has been widely hailed and rewarded for its innovativeness and unprecedented out reach. While micro-credit is one among the many strategies initiated under the Kudumbashree, it has been gaining in importance and visibility within the programme.Footnote ³⁹

As discussed earlier, though new elite women entered paid work, the grhini's position as the natural and desirable feminine role was hardly questioned. Indeed, as also mentioned earlier, hard manual labour was gradually projected as non-feminine, and thus non-elite women workers had little access to full femininity. The Kudumbashree's ideological success lay in that it subtly displaced the grhini to make space for the (still self-sacrificing but) income-earning mother. Some work that was deemed unbecoming of women, like scavenging (renamed ‘Clean Kerala Mission’), or work that was formerly identified with women but is now looked down upon, like agricultural labour, has attained acceptability, if not respectability, as women's work—to a limited extent.Footnote ⁴⁰ However, as has been noted elsewhere, the fact that it did not wander too far from prevalent gender arrangements and norms has been equally important.Footnote ⁴¹

Given the above, our observation that Kudumbashree groups operate within an implicit set of spatial regulations and practices, which neutralize the trangressive possibilities of women's mobility into paid work, did not appear to be a coincidence. First, while women's mobility is actively justified, Kudumbashree activities, focused around the neighbourhood group, are often organized to ensure minimum breach of spatial location of women. Group meetings are conducted in the neighbourhood—and within ‘respectable hours’ so that women can reach home after the meeting before dark. The physical mobility of Kudumbashree women rarely crosses the limits of the district, and even when they are dispatched for training programmes, they always move in groups, and, often, the younger women are placed under the watchful eye of the older women. Indeed, in our focus group discussions with members of such groups, senior women's watchfulness over the younger women was often cited as a reason for the success of the group in micro-enterprise. One of the most successful organizers of Kudumbashree units in the Kodakara panchayat in the central district of Thrissur, a senior woman worker, recounted her efforts at group-building thus:

Interestingly, it was found that surveillance at the workplace and in the domestic realm was sometimes used in such a way that one was used to counterbalance the absence or weakness of the other. In a successful micro-enterprise unit in Thiruvananthapuram district, the secretary of the group complained to us that the group had run into serious trouble when some unmarried members of the group eloped and married men of their choice, once they had begun to earn incomes. She told us that the group had decided that they will admit only married women henceforth, to be saved of public censure.

Second, the spaces opened up by the Kudumbashree are largely restricted to women, with the minimal presence of men, usually as representatives of the panchayat or the Kudumbashree mission—there is thus a clear relation of hierarchy between the women and the male representative of the state. Third, these spaces reproduce codes of respectable female embodiment. Such sartorial norms are also adopted by the Kudumbashree women—when they present themselves at public occasions organized by panchayats, they appear in garb signifying (upper-caste Hindu) Malayalee femininity, the so-called national dress of Malayalee women.Footnote ⁴²

Observers have expressed the doubt whether ‘. . .even in the BPL category, there is a creamy layer for whom such enterprises appear to be little more than an opportunity for social interaction and togetherness’.Footnote ⁴³ The possibility of upward mobility for poor women through Kudumbashree thus involves new spatial arrangements that minimize the transgressive potential of women's movement outside the home, and this also defines inequalities within the category of BPL women. That is, these spatial arrangements suit the better-off among the BPL women, who, according to the elected representatives of the panchayats and some Kudumbashree staff, are in these groups in order to spend their free time, so that they are not ‘idle’. In contrast, poorer women participants have to ‘supplement income or the lack of it by looking for additional coolie work’.Footnote ⁴⁴ This divide has also been confirmed by other research on women's work in Kerala.Footnote ⁴⁵

What appears most significant, however, is that the chances of women's exposure to public life through their work outside the home are also minimized. While Kudumbashree women are a visible presence in most public functions at the local level, the space into which they have entered from within their homes can hardly be characterized as ‘public’. This has recently been admitted by the Mission itself, but this is also highly visible when the nature of the kinds of gatherings the Kudumbashree groups organize is considered.Footnote ⁴⁶ The most common event organized by the women is the annual day. Interviews with Kudumbashree women have alerted us to the degree to which these events resemble not so much public events, as social occasions. The women most often emphasized the fun, dressing up, consumption (most often buying identical sarees and ornaments for the occasion), welcoming and felicitating ‘honoured’ guests, usually panchayat members and bureaucrats.Footnote ⁴⁷ This is, of course, in sharp contrast with the experience of working-class women organized in trade unions since the 1940s, who were active participants, though rarely leaders, in public agitation.Footnote ⁴⁸ It may also be crucial to recognize that the location of the neighbourhood group within social ties may indeed be functional to the working of the micro-credit and micro-enterprise mechanism, ensuring prompt repayment and group commitment to enterprise. This actually falls in line with the work preferences of the new elite educated women observed by researchers: work that is ‘respectable’ and closer to the home is preferred.Footnote ⁴⁹ Women are thus not released into the public; rather, the distance between the space of labour and the space of women's immediate social interaction is blurred.

Gender and Public Acceptance: Successful Women Panchayat Presidents

The other major development in women's mobility in Kerala in the 1990s was towards local governance through the implementation of political decentralization. The 1990s have been widely regarded as an important period which saw the extension of popular democracy and the democratization of development in Kerala.Footnote ⁵⁰ These efforts have also been widely praised as offering opportunities to social groups—especially women—hitherto marginal to politics and government, through reservations at local level.Footnote ⁵¹ Especially, the efforts to induct women into local governance in the People's Planning Campaign (PPC) of the mid-1990s, and the efforts to mobilize poor women into self-help groups, imply continuity with the history of women's entry into politics and the public, which began in the early twentieth century. Thus, these developments are interpreted as extensions of women's access to politics and the public. The 73rd and 74th Amendments to the Indian Constitution, which allowed 33 per cent representation for women in all three levels of the local self-governing bodies including the leadership, were brought into force in the local bodies’ elections in Kerala in 1995. The spaces opened up in this process were undoubtedly ‘glocal’.Footnote ⁵² As Mohan and Stokke have noted, this was part of a world-wide scalar reconfiguration of politics, the ongoing localization of politics mediated by institutional reform towards decentralization, and good governance. Studying the ‘glocal’ then involves empirical investigation of the operation of local forces and political and civil social activisms within the glocalized political field.Footnote ⁵³

This part of the paper is based on 40 interviews with successful women panchayat presidents in all three tiers—those who have won three consecutive terms, either as presidents, or as member first and later as president—and 20 with women politicians active in political party work at the state level across the political spectrum. Our perception that these are ‘successful women’ is also guided by the fact that many of them have moved on from reserved to general seats. The fieldwork was carried out in 2006–7 and covered all districts of the State. The large majority were fielded by the Left Democratic Front, the coalition led by the Communist Party of India (Marxist) (CPM), by the CPM, or the other communist party, the Communist Party of India (CPI); a few were fielded by the rival Congress-led coalition, the United Democratic Front. Our interviewees were aged between 35 and 60 years; most of them were aged above 45 years. Caste-wise, most of our interviewees belonged to the upper castes or middle castes—Ezhavas, Nairs, Syrian Christian, and Muslims in Malabar—and a lesser number of Dalits (not many Dalit women have been successful outside reservation seats). Most of these women had middle-level educational achievements ranging from high school completion to graduation—it was found that the women panchayat presidents could be divided into two groups: ‘the family connections group’ and the ‘retired government servants group’. Of these, the latter had fairly high levels of education and administrative experience/exposure to public institutions. The former often had lower levels of education but their family connections made up for that. It is worth noting that these women are not always proxies, and, even when they are, it does not mean that they are passive. There was also a group which had both advantages. Most of our interviewees were married women often with teenage and adult children.

Three major insights that emerge from these interviews may be worth pursuing. First, in examining their biographies, a common link was found: their previous public exposure was not of political agitation but of development activism, even though some did hold positions in party committees at the local level. Second, the majority of these women claimed to be from ‘party families’, families with a history of stable allegiance to a political party for two or three generations. This would mean that the ways in which these women are linked to their parties may differ significantly compared with the experience of first-generation women politicians. While for the latter entering politics often meant tensions in families and the labour of building up the parties, for the former, such pains are less intense. Both these have interesting implications, and point at distinct spatial configurations that may be further elaborated. Third, both groups pointed out certain conditions that may be largely accessible only to new elite women, such as the presence of the husband/male member as escort and guide, and interestingly, access to cash. Both of these are linked to the women's need to maintain respectability in the local community.

The self-identification of women presidents as development agents and not politicians is all the more interesting when it is noted that in the discourse of the PPC (1995–6), the panchayat was consistently projected as a space of ‘development’ beyond divisive politics. This is evident both in the documents of the PPC as well as in the academic analyses of the PPC, which explicitly draw upon Robert Putnam's depoliticized version of civil society privileging social networks as the fundamental institutions in which the new panchayat is to function.Footnote ⁵⁴ There is reason to think that since 1997, LSGIs in Kerala have not worked to deliver what may be called the ‘liberal economic promise’ of decentralization in Kerala. The ‘liberal promise’ was made in the wake of the perceived economic crisis in Kerala. Also important was the fact that the agenda of socialist welfare in Kerala, which included citizens’ right to land as a productive asset (which is distinct from the provision of housing, a basic consumption resource) along with basic health care, education, and a minimum social security, which had been hegemonic since the 1950s, and which produced remarkable gains in health and education, has been steadily waning since the land reforms of the early 1970s. The decentralization experiment was projected as an attempt to avoid privatization; the LSGIs were also perceived as institutions which would integrate citizens into the market on terms advantageous to them. This was to be achieved through government support: by endowing citizens with adequate skill, initial capital, technical support, and other requirements, for the big initial ‘push’ so that citizens would enter the market as successful producers and not as workers receiving depressed wages.Footnote ⁵⁵ Studies in Kerala's decentralization have shown that the successes of the experiment are largely in the provision of basic needs to the poor—in housing and drinking water—though there is apprehension regarding the sustainability of such provision. In contrast, productive investment by panchayats has been low, and the returns from such investment have been poor. This has been a persistent feature of Kerala's decentralization, which continues to prevail; furthermore it has also been pointed out that individual beneficiary programmes tended to form the larger share of welfare projects in the panchayats.Footnote ⁵⁶ The State's Economic Review for 2007 points out that the spending of the local bodies still follows this pattern: for the period 2002–7, LSGI spending in Kerala has been highest in the infrastructure sector (77.13 per cent), closely followed by the service sector (76.17 per cent), with the productive sector trailing at 60.53 per cent. The authors point out that this is ‘because both block panchayats and municipalities gave priority to infrastructure development, and district panchayats and grama panchayats gave priority to the development of the service sector’.Footnote ⁵⁷ Indeed, it can also be noticed that the formulated grant-in-aid for LSGs for 2002–7 is highest in the service sector compared with both infrastructure and productive sectors: 3399.42 crores against 1485.95 crores in the productive sector and 1615.69 crores in the infrastructure sector.Footnote ⁵⁸

This, it is felt, may have significant impact on the manner in which political decentralization and the institutions created in and through it may be perceived. The functioning of panchayats as providers of basic needs should be viewed against the backdrop of both the above-mentioned phenomena: the rollback of socialist welfarist citizenship (howsoever limited) in which welfare included access to land as a productive resource, and the failure of the newly constituted institutions of local governance as supporting agencies strengthening the entry of citizens into the market as successful producers. Welfare is now highly individualized, targeting poor households rather than oriented towards the welfare of groups, and focused on the state's consumption resources handouts. This conception of welfare appears now to be well entrenched in the state. For instance, recent struggles by Dalits for land as a productive resource—including the ongoing struggle by Dalits over land at Chengara—who were confined to the peripheries of the Left's socialist welfarist citizenship, have been dismissed by Kerala's mainstream Left as illegitimate.Footnote ⁵⁹ Again, studies on the people's assembly in the lowest tier, the Grama Sabha, have pointed out the extent to which these bodies have been reduced to ‘forums for wresting benefits’, attended largely by welfare beneficiaries seeking government handouts.Footnote ⁶⁰ A comparative study of panchayats in three Indian states—Kerala, Madhya Pradesh and Tamil Nadu—revealed that in Kerala, much more than in the other states, the poor approach the village panchayat to obtain help for housing, building latrines and for ‘personal’ matters, such as obtaining help for daughters’ marriages or resolving disputes. The village panchayat thus may appear to be more ‘intimate’, with such issues predominating over civic issues in its everyday functioning.Footnote ⁶¹ Together, all this allows the panchayat to be perceived as a non-political space, the space of development altruism—and therefore, by definition, demanding of ‘feminine capacities’ and thus to women as leaders/managers. The apparent acknowledgement of group interests in the PPC is watered down as groups continue to be conceived of in governmental terms.

In our interviews, successful women panchayat presidents frequently and unambiguously identified themselves not with local politics but with development activism. Those of this group, who held positions within local committees of political parties, were often relieved of those, or they were instructed to devote less time to local-level political work. This is truly in contrast to the experience of women at the higher levels—who are allowed to hold both positions. It was found that women panchayat presidents often interpreted their parties’ demand that they shift away from local party work as ‘greater flexibility’ or ‘less submission to political pressures’—in fact greater mobility within the panchayat, the ‘permission’ to interact with people of different political persuasions and interests, though strictly limited to panchayat boundaries. In contrast, interviews with senior women politicians in the upper echelons of political parties revealed considerable tensions on this count: they experience much tighter party controls on interaction and movement. However, from our fieldwork, it appears that women heads of municipal and other urban governance institutions—and in panchayats where neo-liberal resource-extraction-based development is currently changing local equations rapidly—may not be able to draw so readily on the altruistic–feminine image for self-representation.

Women in Panchayat Raj Institutions (PRIs) generally tended to identify their role as ‘fair distributors’ of welfare benefits—and voiced their immense pleasure at being able to fulfill the function of overseeing such distribution. The interviewees tended to view the resources distributed not in terms of ‘people's rights’, or ‘group interests’, but as entitlements handed out to groups deserving uplift by the state. Given the emergent shape of LSGIs in Kerala as discussed above, this should come as no surprise. The relation of non-reciprocality between the state and these groups, and the shift of the aim of state welfare towards guiding citizens into self-help, then looks extraordinarily similar to the relationship of power posited between the ideal mother who disciplines through ‘gentle power’ and her children in the ideal modern family as imagined in Malayalee social reform of the early twentieth century.Footnote ⁶² That ‘group interests’ are not acknowledged by the women themselves was also evident in the statements of some successful Dalit women presidents, who identified the prestige acquired through their representing of the whole panchayat, to flow to their families, and not to their communities.

The often-noted unevenness of welfare payments is not linked to the differential claims of different groups, or to the preferences of the local party committee, but to insufficiency of funds or to ‘rigidity’ of rules.Footnote ⁶³ The language of pacifism informs their perceptions of such ‘insufficiency’—very frequently, the tendency was to remind the interviewer that ‘those who missed out this time could be covered in the next’.Footnote ⁶⁴ Indeed, a considerable number of these women do project their ‘natural’ affability, approachability, their capacity to be empathetic, as factors that have enabled them to be successful. To quote from one of many such accounts:

Also fieldwork with women panchayat presidents from lower-caste Dalit and tribal communities—not always women who perceive themselves to be successful—reveals considerable tensions experienced by these women, who have to negotiate between meeting the expectations of their respective communities, whom they represent, and remaining faithful to (feminine) ‘fair distribution’. Particularly striking was one case of ‘fair distribution’, reported from a panchayat in Kozhikode district, in which the distribution of the Special Component Plan (SPC) fund to scheduled castes (SC) in the panchayat for renovation of houses aroused tensions, which led the panchayat president—an SC woman president herself—to implement ‘fair distribution’ by dipping into the panchayat's own funds to distribute similar benefits to other castes. Dalit women are also handicapped in their relative lack of access to the new elite feminine ideal. Age, for instance, is a major factor—and most of our Dalit interviewees tended to be younger, many of them aged below 30 years. This pattern is confirmed by the data from the 2005 panchayat elections in Kerala: Dalit women panchayat presidents tend to be around 10 years junior to their counterparts in the general category. This is important, given the fact that the cultural expectation on women to heed such hierarchies and defer to elders—not surprising given that their accepted location is within the family and community—holds strongly in Kerala too. Thus the disadvantage of caste is often intermixed with the disadvantage of age as well.

Their distance from political activism also assures that most successful women presidents mention efficient implementation as their key achievement. For their work does not involve pressurizing the government to yield concessions through agitation; indeed, some women linked their success in implementing the given welfare schemes and mobilizing additional funds directly to their relative exclusion from local party-life and even the public. The president of a panchayat in Kozhikode district made this explicit link:

The implication of the above discussion is that women's newly attained mobility into PRIs has brought to the fore a certain ‘feminine’ agency, which, however, seems to be attained under the condition that women maintain a distance from the competitive world of local political parties. This seems to be underwritten by the projection of the panchayat as a space similar to the home, in need of ‘feminine skills’. In contrast to mid-twentieth century Malayalee political society, in the new spaces of governance opened up through political decentralization in the mid-1990s, which are clearly inside of the local state institutions, ‘femininity’ appears to be a valuable resource.

However, the projection of the panchayat as ‘feminine space’ has apparently not been appropriated by all women who were interviewed, who nevertheless continue to access the discourse that constructs the ‘good woman’ in interesting ways. This was especially pronounced in the ‘family connections’ group, especially among those who are better educated and young, who perceive their participation as a career opportunity, a chance to acquire new and marketable skills, and not as political activism. This may indeed be connected to the fact that the members of the ‘family connections’ group who have entered local governance are second or third generation, for whom this rarely signifies a decisive break of any kind. Family connections now seem to ensure much smoother entry, both at the higher, competitive levels and at the lower levels. Most women panchayat presidents enjoy considerable support from their families, especially husbands. The justifications of women's employment now seem to have gained greater application here. Many of them asserted that their mobility has brought gains not only in the form of an income, but also as greater acceptability for the family. To quote one of the most successful women panchayat presidents in Kerala, from the Alappuzha district: ‘I have been successful for three consecutive terms and now everyone knows me. Though my husband is a local leader of the DYFI [Democratic Youth Federation of India], he is known after me. My children too get this recognition.’ Furthermore, she views her long and successful career as a panchayat president not as a springboard to a higher-level political career or more intense political activism, but as valuable, marketable experience that could secure her employment:

The conditions necessary to maintain a ‘moral image’ may indeed be available largely to the new elite women: this was particularly evident in that our interviewees took pains to stress that their husbands could support them almost fully, even giving up full-time work. This ensured that the women's physical mobility was ensured without any risk to their respectability. Equally striking was the point often made about how women in local governance were in need of greater amounts of cash than men as they often needed to spend more on safe transportation, on ‘respectable’ boarding, etc., when outside their homes. Importantly, they pointed out that unlike male aspirants, women could not really mobilize funds from private parties or even from party sources on their own without risking loss of respectability, and hence only women who could mobilize funds through respectable channels could really be successful. Many women presidents justified their work as Life Insurance Corporation of India (LIC) agents with reference to the need for an income, in addition to the meagre sitting fee they received.

This is, however, not to argue that all ‘successful’ women panchayat presidents draw upon gendered altruistic ideals to characterize their work—there are interesting exceptions, which are important when the possibilities of moving beyond the dominant trope are considered, open to the new entrants. Two exceptional women worth mentioning are from central Kerala where the major coalitions—led by the CPM and the Indian National Congress—are more or less evenly matched. They rose to prominence as panchayat members active in a popular struggle to protect a major fresh-water body, the very lifeline of panchayats located around it. After becoming presidents, these women have continued to support the struggles and get panchayats to pass important legislation to prevent the degradation of the lake. The upward mobility of these two women seems to have been facilitated by two factors: the relative lack of near-total dominance of any one political party, and a popular struggle beyond political divisions. In their interviews, both these women did not hesitate to articulate critiques of the design of decentralization; also, they were not shy of political power and opposition from elements in their own parties. Predictably, such situations are relatively few at present. But given that environmental issues are beginning to have an impact on the lives of ordinary people in rural areas, and because political decentralization has had the unintended consequence of weakening centralized control of parties, such situations may increase in the future. Another interesting instance was that of a tribal woman panchayat president in the Wayanad district, who successfully mobilized the panchayat to fight off the building of a dam which threatened the whole village community. This district is one in which tribal people, despite being a sizeable portion of the local population, are woefully disempowered, and, therefore, it is not easy for a tribal woman to win widespread popular support. Her success has now allowed her to build a strong base in the panchayat, not dependent on the patronage of the local party elite.