Villages, Women, and the Success of Dairy Cooperatives in India: ...

(Sidaway 2007). Postdevelopment, in fact, takes on more ominous forms today given that the unevenness of development is being recoded as normal and justified (World Bank 2009a), an especially crude argument made in favor of a mainstream neoliberalism that seeks to function as a bulwark against alternatives to capitalism. As Rangan's (1996) study of an alternative development movement in northern India concluded,

The strategy adopted in this book to go beyond official meanings of the success and failure of development is one that incorporates diverse constructions of local contexts of development, and seeks to locate development within rural places instead of vice versa. In the case of dairy development in India, an understanding of the local context requires an engagement with the identities that constitute the village in India.

Constructing the Village

In existing analyses of dairy development, the space of development is often rendered equivalent to the space of the village, but the village nevertheless is an “empty presence,” within which much seems to be happening, but whose specific meanings are somehow immaterial to the proceedings. Against this, the task of rendering dairy development as a complex process has to devote itself to following associations between dairy development and rural places in India (Baviskar 1988; A. S. Patel 1988). To a large extent, categorical identities, like the notion of the village, have become associated with fears of “Orientalizing” India. Yet Said's (1979) profound argument regarding the limitations of colonial discourses becomes complicated when postcolonial subject formations are seemingly implicated in the reification of traditional meanings. Equally significant is the fact that for a large segment of India's population, the village remains the site of material livelihoods and affective