Gender and Development

The study carried in the three states of Bihar, Punjab and Uttar Pradesh has brought out several interesting issues regarding home-based work. Today almost all the home- based trades are either challenged for their vulnerability in the fast changing regularised economy or highly marginalised and lost in the vast economic world. However, home-based jobs and the voices of home-based workers are hopefully not entirely unnoticed.

Colonial administrators in India have had a long standing tradition of writing rich ethnographic texts primarily translating local people and their cultures for administrative purposes. But these Euro-centric translations of Asian cultures were not limited to the colonial administrators alone but transgressed to the local people in terms of how they, the local people, decoded and recoded the translations of their own cultures and made sense of themselves. Ethnographic texts, as Clifford argues, emphasizes the literariness of Anthropology, which being situated between powerful systems of meaning affect the ways cultural phenomenon are registered, translated and questioned at the boundaries of civilizations, cultures and races.
Colonial ethnographic texts were also sites of contestations and resistances among local Indian communities that from time to time transformed into social and cultural movements. One such occasion was Rajbanshi Kshatriya movement in eastern India in the late nineteenth century to early half of twentieth century when the Rajbanshi people of upper Bengal protested against the colonial categorization and translation of Rajbanshis as a semi-Mongoloid Hinduised tribe and them being equated with another neighbouring semi-mongoloid indigenous community called Koch. The translation of the colonial ethnographic texts has had a different political connotation as this region, the northern part of Bengal, lies at an intersection of different indigenous communities and cultures spread over eastern Nepal, north-east India, Bhutan and Bangladesh where multiple borders – social, cultural and political overlap. However, by the turn of the century, the translation and interpretation of the colonial ethnographic literature changed its meaning in the post-colonial society and politics of India with the Rajbanshis re-claiming themselves as semi-Mongoloid by referring to the colonial ethnographies which eventually initiated a large ongoing political and linguistic movement in north Bengal and Assam.

This paper describes an interesting approach where the evaluators recognized the value of using local community knowledge and experience in evaluating a Government of India programme for development and empowerment of adolescent girls. The evaluators tried to integrate participatory and appreciative approaches and looked at the evaluation process through a gender and equity lens.

The evaluators, went beyond the mandate of evaluation and focused on building evaluation capacity by fostering ownership of the programme among stakeholders and encouraging the community to be the active agents of change. Instead of traditional evaluation where evaluators go as outsiders to evaluate, we engaged the stakeholders in evaluation.  All the stakeholders including the funding agency, NGO, the adolescent girls and the larger community were engaged in varying degrees from defining the objectives, designing questions, data collection and data analysis in the context of their aspirations and expectations, so that it could be an occasion for recognition and celebration of their strengths.  The local project implementers and the adolescent girls themselves re-evaluated their own response and used them in particular context to further empower themselves. We used principles of strength-based approach and framed appreciative questions, which recognized the strengths of the community and NGO staff.  This created a non-threatening environment, which stimulated open sharing of experiences. Further, this resulted in reinforcing the evaluation process by improving the quality and richness of data that the community produced itself, which would not have been the case in a traditional evaluation.

Additionally, a gender and equity lens was used to conduct the evaluation in six multi-ethnic districts, populated with religious and linguistic minorities and indigenous population. The gender and equity lens allows recognizing the systematic discrimination based on gender, caste, and class. The evaluation was able to probe whether the programme assessed time, mobility, poverty and accessibility constraints of girls, and accounted for intersectional discrimination.

Reconstructing the Past: The Making of Darjeeling through Colonial and Local Narratives
Aparajita De, Asst. Professor, Dept. of Geography, Delhi School of Economics
Rajib Nandi, Research Fellow, Institute of Social Studies Trust, New Delhi
Abstract
As far as documenting and archiving of society and history of the eastern Himalayas are concerned, it was largely the colonial ethnographers and the surveyors who started documenting ecological, social, economical and historical aspects of the region. A substantive part of these studies might have been developed for the colonial administration. However, in the subsequent years, even after independence, these studies have become the primary source of historical data for both scholars and authors writing on the entire region of eastern Himalayas and sub-Himalayan Bengal.
Post colonial historians commented on this very nature of colonial historiography, where Europe remains as the sovereign, theoretical subject of all histories. Consequently, “Indian history” attains a subaltern status, by virtue of it and Europe acts as a silent referent in historical knowledge in the process of categorizing other’s history as non-Western or third-world history.
Post-independent Darjeeling witnessed a large volume of local writings on social and political issues. A large number of these authors were outside academia. There is no doubt that they play an important role in re-writing and re-documenting the regional and local histories. Interestingly, for these authors, colonial documents serve as crucial reference point.
The proposed paper demonstrates the power of local writings in constructing history and ethnography of a region as a continual process of colonial knowledge building on one hand and on the other contributing to the politics of knowledge creation through developing their own categories and methods of analysis. The paper argues that local narratives are not mere products of apolitical memories and personal experiences alone but engage with and is highly influenced by, consciously or unconsciously, by a set of power relations within which people place themselves in. In the case of Darjeeling, personal accounts engage in a continual dialogue with the colonial literature on one hand and resistance to colonial authoritarianism on the other.