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Anna Lindberg, Experience and Identity: A Historical Account of Class, Caste and Gender Among the Cashew Workers of Kerala, 1930–2000. New Delhi: Manohar Publishers, 2021, 386 pp., ₹1,350. ISBN: 9789390729913 (Hardback).

In this article, we foreground the potential for a space for collective deliberation and political subjectivities building among women leaders in local governance. We interrogate the Gramamukhya portal, which was initiated in 2011 and continued until 2015, as a democratic space to politicise the invited spaces of governance. Revisiting the question of women's engagement in panchayati raj institutions in Kerala, we suggest that the practice of citizenship can become politically effective for women in governance if they use a platform that facilitates critical engagement from within and without the invited spaces of participation. This reflection becomes all the more significant given the contemporary political context of Kerala, where the women's question is caught between developmentalist intentions of the state and right-wing political mobilisations at the grass-roots level.

AbstractIn this paper, historical analysis and qualitative fieldwork are combined to question the belief that recent efforts in Kerala to induct women into local governance and mobilize poor women into self-help groups implies continuity with the earlier history of women's mobility into the spaces of paid work and politics. For a longer view, the histories of gender-coding of spaces and of women's mobility into paid work and politics are examined. In the twentieth century, while the subversive potential of paid work was contained through casting it within 'feminine terms', politics was unquestionably 'unfeminine space'. However, recent efforts have not advanced women's mobility in any simple sense. The subversive potential of women's mobility towards work in self-help groups is still limited. In local governance, unlike the experience of an earlier generation of women, the ability to conform to norms of elite femininity now appears to be a valuable resource.

Micro-finance and its (purported) capacity to empower women is by now a well-explored field all over the world. We now have several tools by which micro-finance programmes may be assessed. However, here we attempt to critically assess the claims of the Kerala government's poverty eradication programme, the Kudumbashree, which combines a micro-finance model with other elements through critical feminist lenses. Further, we attempt to place this programme within Kerala's own historical experience of empowering the poor. Given the fact that this major effort to popularise micro-finance in Kerala has the twin aims of poverty alleviation and women's empowerment, this seems justified. We try to place the 'micro-finance revolution' in Kerala within the larger historical trajectory of successive 'regimes of empowerment' in order to understand the different political stakes in each, and their implications for gender politics. While using some of the available tools that employ indicators of gender effectiveness to assess the impact of micro-finance in empowering women is certainly a basic exercise, the present approach allows us to draw lessons for effective gender politics through a comparison with earlier modes of empowering the deprived classes in Kerala.

International audience ; This paper examines the operation of Kudumbashree, the Poverty Eradication Mission for Kerala (India). Kudumbashree operates through female-only Neighbourhood Groups, which aim to contribute to their participants' economic uplift, and to integrate them with the activities and institutions of local governance. As such, Kudumbashree echoes poverty alleviation programmes elsewhere in the Global South designed to link poverty alleviation to 'active citizenship'. This paper evaluates the programme, arguing that although Kudumbashree has undoubtedly been successful in supporting women's public participation, questions remain over the autonomy of the 'invited spaces' it has created, and the underlying vision of poverty alleviation it embodies.