Introduction

Abstract

This is an anthropological study that takes as its object of inquiry not just the women who were the targets of the Mahila Samakhya education project in India (1989) but also the men and women who developed the project. In other words, I am simultaneously concerned with both the apparatus of development and the effects of such a development in two localized settings: Delhi and Chitrakoot in India. But my concern is not just with how the apparatus produces which effects but with several other questions. What bodies constitute this apparatus? Why these bodies in particular and in this time and this space? Which social and political histories do they embody and articulate in terms of development? How are conflictual histories and politics managed in the production of a development strategy? How does the development strategy in its formalized form betray no single intention or politics, even though it is constituted at the confluence of many? These and other related issues are the focus of this book. I also delineate another aspect of this development apparatus—the implementation or operationalizing aspect. Here, I am concerned with those bodies, the “middle” bodies, which apply a development strategy in real spaces and upon real, other bodies. I am concerned here with “middle” agents who manufacture consent for such a strategy and the manner in which they do so.