“Where the Knots of Narrative Are Tied and Untied”: The Dialogic Production of Gendered Development Spaces in North India

Abstract

Participatory research with a Rajasthani (India) drinking water supply project indicates that women's participation has generated an ongoing struggle inside the implementing nongovernmental organization (NGO) and in villages. A Bakhtinian analysis of the project's women's participation program can illuminate the micropolitics of dialogic struggles surrounding women's participation and its related spaces. Bakhtin's concepts of utterance, dialogic process, and chronotope offer geographers a framework for analyzing the constant, simultaneous production of meaning and space. A Bakhtinian analysis of NGO fieldworkers' speech accesses the micropolitics within social relations, which construct gendered spaces. Gendered participatory approaches need reevaluation because dialogues about women's participation extend the scope of that participation beyond what is intended by development policymakers and practitioners. As part of their work, fieldworkers simultaneously are influenced by and contribute to shifting spaces of gendered domination, flexible meanings of women's participation, and newly audible voices. Verbal struggles over gendered spaces lead to new meanings of women's participation. These new meanings in turn expand the influence of women's participation as a platform for sociospatial change. Gendered gains may be temporary and incremental, but where before there was little precedent or feeling for women's participation within the drinking water supply project, over time women's participation became linked to all project goals.

Key Words:

• Bakhtin
• development
• gender
• India
• space

Acknowledgments

This article is part of a larger research project that was funded partially by the American Institute of Indian Studies and a University of Kentucky Post-Doctoral Fellowship for Women in Under-Represented Areas. The suggestions of Dale Bauer, Tom Bassett, Batamaka Somé, Moussa Kone, Betsy Beymer, Paul Robbins, Stuart Elden, Sue Roberts, and Tad Mutersbaugh improved this paper. Special thanks to Lori Serb, Kirk Stueve, and Jenna Lloyd for editorial support. For their generosity, I am grateful to the staff of Our Water, Tasneem Khan, and Brooke Woodruff. Many thanks to Audrey Kobayashi and three anonymous reviewers for their constructive criticism and advice.

Notes

1. Everett (1997) and Bebbington (2000) offer similar critiques, indicating that local people encounter development programs as they are making their own way. Thus development agendas may be resisted, incorporated, and/or manipulated to fit with individual plans.

2. Bakhtin's premises encompass the chronotopic complexity of relationships between author, ethnographic writing, and audience. See Folch-Serra (1990), England (1994), and Sutherland (2004) for geographic considerations of Bakhtin-informed ethnography.

3. Villagers pay for water based on the quantity they use—the less they use, the cheaper the price. The most they are asked to pay for water is 4 rupees per 1,000 liters (approximately US$0.10).

4. The real names of fieldworkers have not been used. As the women's participation program officer is unique in her position as the only woman manager, I have received her permission to identify her in the text.

5. The Government of India Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment offers the following definitions of “scheduled castes”: “extreme social, education and economic backwardness arising out of the traditional practice of untouchability” and “scheduled tribes”: “indications of primitive traits, distinctive culture, geographical isolation, shyness of contact with the community at large and backwardness.” http://socialjustice.nic.in/schedule/faq.htm#sc1 (last accessed 22 October 2005). “Other backward classes” have been selected by the Government of National Capital Territory of Delhi Commission for Other Backward Classes based on “social and educational backwardness.” http://delhigovt.nic.in/newdelhi/dept/obc/CC.doc (last accessed 22 October 2005).

6. This figure is in keeping with the Rajasthan Excise Department's 2005 per capita income figure of Rs. 13,066. http://www.rajexcise.org (last accessed 22 October 2005).

7. North India is defined here (and elsewhere) as Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, and Rajasthan (see Jeffery and Jeffery 1997; Dreze and Gazdar 1998).

8. The Government of India defines a “main” worker as someone who works more than 183 days a year.

9. See Basu (1999) for an argument on how southern Indian states seem to be following a north Indian trend in terms of sex preference.

10. Watts (1995) and others (e.g., Blaikie 2000) note that the populist agenda of participatory approaches meets the needs of both mainstream and alternative development camps. For example: new social movements and/or NGOs compensate for a decline of the state (Clark 1995; Paley 2001); participation can reconnect the state and their populations (World Bank 1997); local cultural and scientific knowledge fill in the gaps where “expert” science has failed (Shiva 1989); local involvement brings project costs down, leads to project sustainability and provides better feedback (World Bank 1997).

11. In the case of Our Water, plans for activating community participation followed trends favoring participatory approaches to natural resource management. However, community participation was fitted into preexisting large-scale plans that left scant room for local actors to maneuver. The GOR and German donor bank had already decided on the necessity of a new water supply system infrastructure and its design prior to signing cooperation agreements. Community members were given only minor roles (e.g., public tap site selection, election of local management boards, and payment arrangements).

12. Some scholars believe that the early work of V. N. Voloshinov and P. N. Medvedev was actually written by Bakhtin, with minor contributions from them. As this conflict is unlikely to be settled with certainty, for clarity's sake I list Bakhtin as the first author in the main text and in the Reference entries, but note here that Morris (1994), editor of The Bakhtin Reader, attributes work earlier believed solely to be that of Voloshinov or Medvedev to each and also credits Bakhtin. J. Holloway and Kneale (2000) note that the confusion over who wrote what is well in keeping with Bakhtin's concepts of open-ended dialogue.

13. Bakhtin's use of the term “ideology” refers to a given social group's world view, rather than a conscious, political viewpoint (Morris 1994, 249).

14. This concept is also found in Foucault, but heteroglossia, given its prefix, reminds us more constantly than the term “discourse” of the multiplicity of meanings and contradictions contained within discourses.

15. Williams (1977, 112) suggests that hegemony is “always a process,” not a system or a structure. Hegemony viewed as practice must be understood as actively renewed and recreated, just as it is continually resisted and limited. Counterhegemony and alternative hegemony, which threaten hegemony, are “real and persistent elements of practice” (113). Counterhegemonies indicate what hegemonic processes have to control—hegemonic processes must respond to the oppositions that threaten them. In this way counterhegemony is part of the process of hegemony.

16. Bakhtin holds that the utterance is not a matter of free choice on the part of any individual—imposed from without are recognizable patterns and orders of speech which limit flexibility, ease, and creativity when speaking. Bakhtin refers to these patterns and orders of speech as speech genres. The concept of speech genres does not contradict Bakhtin's arguments for the constant flexibility of meaning and language. He theorizes that speech genres form a frame around language that helps listeners and speakers begin to make sense of what is said, but do not determine the utterance, leaving open creative possibilities.

17. Village water committees are registered local institutions of elected representatives, who oversee decisions, care, and payment for drinking water once the village signs a contract with the GOR.

18. Daughters-in-law are generally easy to spot because they are the women (in a group of women) who keep their faces completely covered in deference to their mothers-in-law and other senior women.

19. It is the most basic form of Rajasthani hospitality to offer water to guests. By asking for water, the women's participation program officer indicates that she is a guest, that she must be accommodated, and that she is not in a hurry to be off.

20. Kishore is aware of this hierarchy, as he knows the women fieldworkers of the NGO.